Mega Millions Jackpot Climbs to $1.05 Billion

The Mega Millions jackpot climbed to an estimated $1.05 billion Friday night, only the fifth time in the history of the game that the grand prize has reached into the billions.

No one managed to beat the massive odds and match all six numbers for Friday’s estimated $940 million jackpot. The numbers drawn were: 5, 10, 28, 52, 63 and the gold ball 18.

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There have been 29 straight draws without a Mega Millions jackpot winner since the last grand prize ticket on April 18.

The $1.05 billion prize up for grabs in the next drawing Tuesday night would be for a sole winner choosing to be paid through an annuity, with annual payments over 30 years. Jackpot winners almost always opt for a lump sum payment, which for Tuesday’s drawing would be an estimated $527.9 million.

The potential jackpot is the fourth-largest in the game and the fifth over $1 billion, Mega Millions said in a statement early Saturday.

Although there were no jackpot winners, one ticket in Pennsylvania was worth $5 million and another in the state connected for $1 million. There also were $1 million winners in Arizona, California and New York, Mega Millions said.

It has been less than two weeks since someone in Los Angeleswon a $1.08 billion Powerball prize that ranked as the sixth-largest in U.S. history. The winner of the prize is still a mystery.

Lottery jackpots grow so large because the odds of winning are so small. For Mega Millions, the odds of winning the jackpot are about 1 in 302.6 million.

Winners also would be subject to federal taxes, and many states also tax lottery winnings.

Mega Millions is played in 45 states, Washington, D.C., and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

source https://time.com/6299406/mega-millions-jackpot-climbs/

Cases of Tick-Borne Illnesses Are on the Rise. Some Experts Believe Climate Change is the Cause

(NEW YORK) — In 2022, doctors recorded the first confirmed case of tick-borne encephalitis virus acquired in the United Kingdom.

It began with a bike ride.

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A 50-year-old man was mountain biking in the North Yorkshire Moors, a national park in England known for its vast expanses of woodland and purple heather. At some point on his ride, at least one black-legged tick burrowed into his skin. Five days later, the mountain biker developed symptoms commonly associated with a viral infection — fatigue, muscle pain, fever.

At first, he seemed to be on the mend, but about a week later, he started to lose coordination. An MRI scan revealed he had developed encephalitis, or swelling of the brain. He had been infected with tick-borne encephalitis, or TBE, a potentially deadly disease that experts say is spreading into new regions due in large part to global warming.

For the past 30 years, the U.K. has become roughly 1 degree Celsius warmer (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) on average compared to the historical norm. Studies have shown that several tick-borne illnesses are becoming more prevalent because of climate change. Public health officials are particularly concerned about TBE, which is deadlier than more well-known tick diseases such as Lyme, due to the way it has quickly jumped from country to country.

Gábor Földvári, an expert at the Center for Ecological Research in Hungary, said the effects of climate change on TBE are unmistakable.

“It’s a really common problem which was absent 20 or 30 years ago,” he added.

Ticks can’t survive more than a couple of days in temperatures below zero, but they’re able to persevere in very warm conditions as long as there’s enough humidity in the environment. As Earth warms on average and winters become milder, ticks are becoming active earlier in the year. Climate change affects ticks at every stage of their life cycle — egg, six-legged larva, eight-legged nymph, and adult — by extending the length of time ticks actively feed on humans and animals. Even a fraction of a degree of global warming creates more opportunity for ticks to breed and spread disease.

“The number of overwintering ticks is increasing and in spring there is high activity of ticks,” said Gerhard Dobler, a doctor who works at the German Center for Infection Research. “This may increase the contact between infected ticks and humans and cause more disease.”

Since the virus was first discovered in the 1930s, it has mainly been found in Europe and parts of Asia, including Siberia and the northern regions of China. The same type of tick carries the disease in these areas, but the virus subtype — of which there are several — varies by region. In places where the virus is endemic, tick bites are the leading cause of encephalitis, though the virus can also be acquired by consuming raw milk from tick-infected cattle. TBE has not been found in the United States, though a few Americans have contracted the virus while traveling in Europe.

According to the World Health Organization, there are between 10,000 and 12,000 cases of the disease in Europe and northern Asia each year. The total number of cases worldwide is likely an undercount, as case counts are unreliable in countries where the population has low awareness of the disease and local health departments are not required to report cases to the government. But experts say there has been a clear uptick since the 1990s, especially in countries where the disease used to be uncommon.

“We see an increasing trend of human cases,” Dobler said, citing rising cases in Austria, Germany, Estonia, Latvia, and other European countries.

TBE is not always life-threatening. On average, about 10 percent of infections develop into the severe form of the illness, which often requires hospitalization. Once severe symptoms develop, however, there is no cure for the disease. The death rate among those who develop severe symptoms ranges from 1 to 35 percent, depending on the virus subtype, with the far-eastern subtype being the deadliest. In Europe, for example, 16 deaths were recorded in 2020 out of roughly 3,700 confirmed cases.

Up to half of survivors of severe TBE have lingering neurological problems, such as sleeplessness and aggressiveness. Many infected people are asymptomatic or only develop mild symptoms, Dobler said, so the true caseload could be up to 10 times higher in some regions than reports estimate.

While there are two TBE vaccines in circulation, vaccine uptake is low in regions where the virus is new. Neither vaccine covers all of the three most prevalent sub-types, and a 2020 study called for development of a new vaccine that offers higher protection against the virus. In Austria, for example, the TBE vaccine rate is near 85 percent, Dobler said, and yet the number of human cases continues to trend upward — a sign, in his opinion, of climate change’s influence on the disease.

In central and northern Europe, where for the past decade average annual temperatures have been roughly 2 degrees Celsius above pre industrial times (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), documented cases of the virus have been rising in recent decades — evidence, some experts say, that rising global temperatures are conducive to more active ticks. The parasitic arachnids are also noted to be moving further north and higher in altitude as formerly inhospitable terrain warms to their preferred temperature range. Northern parts of Russia are a prime example of where TBE-infected ticks have moved north. Some previously tick-free mountains in Germany, Bavaria, and Austria are reporting a 20-fold increase in cases over the past 10 years.

The virus’s growing shadow across Europe, Asia, and now parts of the United Kingdom throws the dangers of tick-borne disease into sharp relief. The U.K. bicyclist who was the first domestically acquired case of the disease survived his bout with TBE, but the episode serves as a warning to the region: though the virus is still rare, it may not stay that way for long.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This story is part of a collaboration between The Associated Press and Grist exploring the intersection of climate change and infectious diseases.

source https://time.com/6299276/tick-borne-illnesses-climate-change/

Hulu’s Sleeper Hit This Fool Is One of the Funniest Shows on TV

Need a laugh? Unfortunately, it’s a fallow time for small-screen comedy, as concurrent SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes have put Hollywood productions on hold. Late-night shows and SNL have been on hiatus since May. Upcoming seasons of streaming favorites like Hacks and Big Mouth are indefinitely delayed. Abbott Elementary, Ghosts, and just about every other network sitcom has been pushed off the fall schedule. The good news is, there are plenty of funny shows already on streaming services (that you can enjoy with the blessing of the unions, which have yet to call for consumer boycotts). I don’t just mean moldy standbys like Friends and The Office. Hulu’s This Fool, which debuted last year, is one of the most consistently hilarious shows on TV. And its full, 10-episode second season arrives on the platform on July 28.  

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As in many classic sitcoms, the premise is simple. Co-creator and stand-up comic Chris Estrada stars as Julio Lopez, a 30-year-old South Central L.A. native still living at home with his mom (Laura Patalano) and grandma (Julia Vera) while working for a nonprofit, Hugs Not Thugs, that reorients ex-gang members for the straight world. His cousin Luis (Frankie Quiñones) happens to be a former gang member, who has just been released from prison after a long sentence. A nerdy kid who grew up to be a repressed, self-abnegating adult, Julio has nothing but bad memories of Luis, who used to bully him. But they’re forced into close proximity anyway, because Luis has nowhere to go but his aunt’s house and nothing to do but Hugs Not Thugs.

“This fool” is a term of grudging affection as well as a pejorative, and a similar mix of comical exasperation, tough love, and good-natured ribbing defines both the cousins’ relationship and the tone of the show. For Julio, who’s stuck in an on-again-off-again cycle with his longtime girlfriend, Maggie (Michelle Ortiz), and risks aging into a lefty crank like his boss, Minister Payne (the great Michael Imperioli), the incorrigible Luis is a well-timed shock to the status quo. And for Luis, Julio is a whiny pain in the ass who just might pester him into getting his life back on track. 

Estrada cleverly reverses their predicaments by the beginning of Season 2. Now, Luis has a job as a security guard at a men’s formalwear shop—and an unequivocally single Julio is also unemployed after Payne tries and spectacularly fails to peddle his sexual services to a couple of billionaire benefactors in exchange for a crucial donation to the perennially broke Hugs Not Thugs. At least he’s finally moved out of his mom’s house… and into the grimy, illegal garage apartment that Luis rents from a local character, Don Emilio (Ramón Franco). The neighbors are more bothered by Emilio’s rooster, whose crowing wakes them up at the crack of dawn.

The best comedies can be incredibly smart and gloriously stupid at once. This Fool strikes an ideal balance, grounding its central odd couple in the vividly specific dynamics of a working-class L.A. neighborhood where gangs and poverty persist, good jobs are hard to find, and cultural tensions can flare up between nonwhite communities as Black families live side-by-side with Latin American immigrants. Social consciousness is baked into the Hugs Not Thugs story line; this is a show about second chances. And the characters are richly observed, from Patalano’s obsessively frugal Esperanza to Luis, a reactive schemer whose soft center is always visible beneath his tough exterior thanks to a standout performance from Quiñones.

Instead of starting with an agenda and stirring in jokes, Estrada lets his commentary come out organically, through plots that reflect the daily absurdities of urban life and humor whose target is often the rich and amoral. Scenarios range from purposely banal (one Season 2 episode opens with a pair of white office drones puzzling over what to write in a retirement card for Esperanza, who’s cleaned their space for 23 years) to the borderline surrealism of an excellent two-part episode that finds Julio and Luis taken hostage in a bodega robbery. (Julio’s bored mom and grandma eventually show up to spectate.) The comedy is both gleefully, raunchily physical—the size of Payne’s, er, endowment is a running joke—and weirdly observant. “You look like you eat oven-baked chips,” one character scoffs at Julio, and he really does.

If the challenge of a debut season is to establish compelling characters, a vividly realized social world, and a distinctive voice while also moving the story along, then it’s in the follow-up that a show must prove its potential for longevity. Like Reservation Dogs and The Bear (to name two of the most acclaimed comedies of the current decade), This Fool uses its second season to capitalize on the character development it accomplished in the first, remixing the ensemble into new configurations, adjusting the backdrop, and devoting whole episodes to individual supporting players. Story lines focused on the cousins’ love lives can feel a little too familiar; the female characters could use some more depth. But when the show is in its sweet spot, with Julio and Luis and sometimes Payne busting each other’s chops and getting in their own way, it’s as funny as anything you’re likely to watch in this cursed year for comedy.

source https://time.com/6298208/this-fool-season-2-review/

The Misdirected Anger at Bob Iger Risks Seeing the Bigger Picture

Hollywood loves a good foil—but reality can be more complex than that.  

In recent weeks, actors and writers in Hollywood have deemed Disney CEO Bob Iger as a cartoon caricature of a pampered, out-of-touch movie mogul.

On July 25, Breaking Bad star Bryan Cranston raged against Iger for “taking away our dignity and giving it to robots.” Days before, SAG president Fran Drescher called Iger an “ignoramus” who should be “locked behind doors.”

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Iger’s sin was that he attended the industry’s Sun Valley business retreat and then, while not directly involved in the strike negotiations, commented that “one has to be realistic about the business environment.” He further said that the actors and writers do need to be “compensated fairly based on the value that they delivered,” and cited the recent deal with the Directors Guild as a model.

While writers and actors are right to raise issues of fairness and accountability within the workplace, perhaps Iger is not the person who should be on the receiving end of their ire. For there is a larger system at work we must scrutinize—where tech giants reign supreme and are straining the traditional entertainment business model.

Today, the content producers are hardly a monolith but are actually a kaleidoscope of disparate players. Disney is just one of five major studios – the others being NBCUniversal, Paramount/CBS, Sony, and Warner Bros. The film studios are just one of many sets of ascendant Hollywood players who have overwhelmed the old studios in both power and money, ranging from the streaming giants such as Netflix, Amazon, and Apple, to showrunners including many big-name actor-producers and director-producers, to private equity players getting in on the action such as Apollo, Blackstone, and KKR.

The ire directed at Iger risks missing this broader picture. The streaming tech giants are disdainful of the actors and writers understandably demanding fair compensation. The actors need the streaming content viewership data and streaming residuals, but the streamers prefer to release only total subscription count and not show-by-show breakdowns; while the traditional business model of studios and TV networks have long trumpeted viewership through box office grosses and Nielsen ratings, sharing profit with creative talent. Legacy entertainment businesses like Disney have added offerings such as Disney+ that mirror those of the streamers, but Netflix has tens of millions more subscribers than Disney+, and Netflix produces about 400 original content titles annually while Disney merely produces about 15 theatricals and about 40 TV shows every year.

The writers and actors are right to raise issues of fairness regarding job displacement, intellectual property ownership, authorship credit, and streaming residual payments with the intrusive threats of AI. But ironically, by fanning the flames of the strike, some of these actors—who are conflicted because they double as showrunners and have their own production deals with the studios and streamers— are actually undercutting their own bargaining positions, as the studios will likely soon invoke force majeure to suspend many of the overly-generous deals that went to big-name showrunners during the heyday of the streaming wars and trim their content pipelines of gluttony. Some of these were deals worth upwards of a whopping $250 million and which amounted to very little, sometimes reportedly just to buy them off from working with a competitor. Furthermore, it is the showrunners themselves who will be making most decisions on how and when to integrate AI into the creative process, not the studios who merely fund and distribute their films.

Read More: ‘They Are Doing Bad Things to Good People’: Fran Drescher on Why SAG-AFTRA Is Striking

For years, Iger has always been a popular champion of creative talent. He melded the actors, directors, writers, and producers of the Marvel, Pixar, Lucasfilm, and Fox universes seamlessly into Disney over two decades, and upon his return, instantly re-organized Disney to unravel his predecessor Bob Chapek‘s centralized bureaucratic control. Furthermore, Iger restored Disney’s reputation after it fell dramatically when Chapek capitulated to Florida’s Governor DeSantis on the “Don’t Say Gay” legislation.

These attacks on Iger are being exploited by ideologues and cynics, with some suggesting that Iger has already failed in his comeback and should be replaced after only six months. These spectators do not know much about genuine turnaround management. Returning CEOs have restored their companies to greatness over years, not weeks. Starbucks stock was down 48.5% one year after Howard Schultz returned to Starbucks in 2008, but after three years had returned 63%; likewise, after Michael Dell returned to Dell in 2007, the stock fell 17.3% a year into his tenure but Dell is now at least two times more valuable.  Meanwhile Steve Jobs, who returned to Apple in 1997 took three years for Apple’s stunning stock rebound of 403%. Iger’s last tour of duty shows he has the credibility and competence to deliver, with 600% total shareholder returns and 11 of the 12 top all-time box-office hits during his previous stint.

There was a time when all-powerful media titans showed a tin ear towards creativity. Hollywood mogul Samuel Goldwyn once complained, “Here I am paying big money to you writers and what for? All you do is change the words. If you want to send a message, send a telegram.” As much as the strikers nostalgically conjure up those ghosts from the past as foils, today’s media mosaic is far more complex. We believe Iger is genuinely grappling with unprecedented business challenges amidst tectonic industry shifts.

source https://time.com/6299181/bob-iger-hollywood-big-tech-essay/

A Russian Human-Rights Champion on Why Putin’s Soviet Propaganda Is So Dangerous

This article is part of The D.C. Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox.

To appreciate the power of a myth, let’s take a quick visit to post-Soviet Russia.

In the weeks after Vladimir Putin came to power in early 2000, the new Russian president was enjoying a 77% job approval rating, a definite improvement from his 31% outlook just a few months earlier while he was biding time as then-President Boris Yeltsen’s prime minister inside a fast-unspooling regime. Putin had grand designs for his country, and his new constituents seemed to want to help him build his proverbial temple to Soviet nostalgia. Putin had watched in horror through the 1990s as democratic ideals came in fits and twitches after the collapse of the Soviet Union. He professed to be an agent of change, a steadying hand, a steward of the rebooted nation’s deep history. But Russia was coming out of an inflation tailspin of 85%, unemployment was stuck in the double digits, and the promises of reform were not making life much better. He didn’t have much room for error, and he knew it.

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The answer? Putin basically promised to Make Russia Great Again, and launched a concerted effort to invoke the nostalgia of the Soviet empire. 

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Putin has made no secret that he sees the end of the Soviet system as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century,” one that has been an animating tragedy that he’s been trying to undo over almost a quarter century leading that petrostate. To accomplish this, however, he needed to inspire—not his strongest suit as a stiff former KGB spook who famously has little time for pleasantries. But Russia’s grand history? That was something Putin could work with. So over the last two-plus decades, Putin has enmeshed Russia’s glory days, including its cruel Soviet era, with the present. As TIME’s then-editor Richard Stengel explained in an essay announcing Putin as our Person of the Year in 2007: “Russia lives in history—and history lives in Russia.”

The result has been a crude re-Stalinization of sorts, or a systematic rehabilitation of the brutal Soviet figure who led his colossus for 30 years until his death in 1953. The last time Russia’s most respected independent pollsters, Levada, asked about Joseph Stalin, a stunning 51% of respondents had positive views of him. That 2019 survey found just 15% of Russians offering negative views of the man who created the Gulag system that operated until 1987. An eye-popping 70% of Russians said Stalin’s contributions to the country’s history were a net positive. By contrast, Mikail Gorbachev, the first and last President of the Soviet Union who set in motion democratic reforms, enjoyed a 15% positive reaction when Russians were last asked about him in 2017. 

Much of that is thanks to Putin’s decades-long propaganda project, which has taken on new geopolitical urgency during the war in Ukraine, and now matters more than ever. 

“The majority of Russians still see their glory in the forcible restoration of the Russian Empire,” Oleksandra Matviichuk, who runs a major human rights group in Ukraine, the Center for Civil Liberties, tells TIME. “The success of Ukraine will provide a chance for the democratic future of Russia, because it will provide the push for people to reflect that maybe it’s not OK in the 21st Century to invade other countries and kill people to erode their identity. Maybe it’s better to find our glory in something else.”

Matviichuk visited TIME’s Washington Bureau this week, sitting alongside two other representatives of groups co-honored with a Nobel Peace Prize last year. One was Aleksandr Cherkasov, chairman-in-exile of Russian human rights organization Memorial, which researched Stalin’s systems, organized sites of remembrance for his victims, and documented the sins of the Soviet era as a warning against repetition. It was shut down by the state in 2021, right before the country invaded Ukraine.  Cherkasov says that the lessons he learned from ferreting out the truth should be applied now to try to dismantle Putin’s powerful propaganda effort to help Ukraine win the war. “Right now, we have a tremendous task ahead of us,” he says. “We understand that we need to work on the Soviet past, and it’s a very complex past. But we also have 35 years—which is half of the 70 years of the Soviet period—in the post-Soviet period, which is no less complicated.”

Adds Matviichuk, whose organization has documented 45,000 examples of war crimes Russia has committed in Ukraine—and counting: “Now, we are in the situation where Russia wants to return us to the past. But the future plays against Russia. That is why Russia will lose, sooner or later.”

She is right, at least when it comes to invented legends. Myths are fickle beasts. In a parallel reality of his creation, Putin is a popular and decisive leader determined to restore glory to Russia. In another reality—one closer attuned to the real world—Putin is presiding over a fragile autocracy that survives only because his pact with oligarchs allows them to share the spoils of a kleptocracy. (Oh, and nukes.)

“The propaganda has roots in the imperialistic culture of Russia,” says Matviichuk. “People in Russia still need to provide a reflection of their imperialistic culture.”

Thanks to an unmatched propaganda machine—described in detail by TIME’s Vera Bergengruen here—Putin has mostly prevailed in sparking that invented and often perverted memory, at least at home. (After his invasion of Georgia in 2008 fell flat, Putin learned the lesson of trying to spin on the cheap and he almost tripled the propaganda budget over the three years that followed. RT, a broadcasting effort masquerading as a news station, now spends $300 million annually for Russian-language pro-Kremlin programming.)

But Putin’s war in Ukraine may be testing that perceived glory more than at any time in living memory. New polling from Levada reveals the most pessimistic Russian population in 15 years; 58% believe that “hard times are yet to come,” and another quarter think they’re already there, according to polling released this month. Among the naysayers, almost half point to the invasion of Ukraine and the attenuating death tolls. One independent analysis puts the Russian death toll at almost 50,000. 

Still, 76% of Russians in the same poll said they trusted Putin. And when asked if the fighting in Ukraine was heading toward eventually ensnaring NATO, 60% answered in the affirmative last month, up 12 points from a year earlier.

All of which is why the trio of human rights leaders made the trek to Washington to meet with think tanks, administration officials, and journalists to make the case that helping to land a decisive win against Russia could reset not just Ukraine’s future, but could force a rethinking of what Russia looks like after Putin—a question the West is hesitant to reckon with. (TIME’s Brian Bennett has an assessment of the Nobel Laureates’ visit here.)

“Without justice, we have never sustained peace,” Matviichuk told us.

Left unsaid, of course was this: without truth, there can be no meaningful justice. And, at the moment, Soviet-style spin has gummed up the gears of that churn of accurate information to the point of evading accountability. We all think Putin is building a scaffolding to build and defend political power; he may actually be designing a system to evade any comeuppance at all. After all, if no one can agree to the facts of an offense, did the crime even take place? That’s a problem with big stakes not just for Russians, but for the whole Western world seeking stability in the region. As Cherkasov said in our conference room here in D.C.: “Houston, we all have a problem.”

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source https://time.com/6299212/a-russian-human-rights-champion-on-why-putins-soviet-propaganda-is-so-dangerous/

The U.S. Should Ditch AC and Use Middle Eastern Techniques to Cool its Cities

As heat waves break records across the U.S., more Americans are relying on air conditioning than ever before. Approximately 88% of all households in the country use air conditioning units, which have become essential for both comfort and health as temperatures rise. That compares to 77% of households having AC in 2001. 

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But with air conditioning comes both environmental and socioeconomic consequences. Air conditioning is believed to cause 1,950 million tons of CO2 emissions per year around the world, accounting for almost 4% of global carbon emissions. It’s also drive up electricity bills, making it unaffordable for some low income people, who are more likely to require emergency room visits due to extreme heat.

It doesn’t have to be like this, though. In hot climates around the world, people have been designing sustainable buildings to withstand extreme heat for hundreds of years, says John Onyango, a professor at the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture.

“In the U.S. we’ve been so used to feeding on cheap energy that we forgot to innovate,” says Onyango. “We have many techniques we can use to reduce heat, and we can actually borrow from what happens in the Middle East and look at Iran or look at Dubai and Turkey.”

Harnessing the wind to cool interiors

In some scorching cities, ancient forms are being used in modern construction.

In Masdar City in Abu Dhabi, a four-story building that serves as Siemens’s Middle Eastern headquarters was designed to cool itself without the use of air conditioning. It was one of the first buildings in the region to receive a LEED platinum certification from the U.S. Green Buildings council, meaning it is among the most sustainable buildings on the planet. The Siemens building, which was completed in 2014, includes traditional barajeel along with carefully shaped ceiling structures that allow for natural light while preventing overheating in the hot desert climate.

Barajeels have passively cooled buildings for centuries. These wind towers can lower temperatures by up to 50 degrees Fahrenheit depending on how they are designed and the levels of wind, according to Onyango. They work by funneling hot winds from outside to the lower floors of the building or even underground, where the air is cooled naturally. The cooled air is then released inside the building.

So long as there is wind flowing, the barajeel works without ever requiring electricity. Versions of these windcatcher systems can even be used in high rises, according to Onyango.

In tall buildings, wind can be funneled through chimney-like structures called chases, says Onyango. The air flowing through the chases is then cooled by the mass of the walls, and then brought back into the building.

Another way to significantly improve the ability of a building to cool itself is to use high domed-shaped roofs, says Amin Al-Habaibeh, a professor at the School of Architecture Design and the Built Environment at Nottingham Trent University.

“The advantage of having a dome structure is that part of the building will be in the sun, but the other side of the building will be in the shadow,” says Al-Habaibeh. 

This means that the heat from the sun will be naturally dispersed and less concentrated than in structures with flat roofs, he says. Using natural materials—like the stone and mud used to make homes in hot climates in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia—can help make buildings more sustainable and heat resistant, Al-Habaibeh says. In cities like Sana’a in Yemen and Djenné in Mali, many of these centuries-old, mud-based buildings are still used today. 

“These environmentally friendly materials would absorb moisture during the night and evaporate during the day creating a sort of natural cooling effect,” he says.

Energy-efficient construction materials

Unlike the production process for steel or concrete, the production of stone and mud bricks does not lead to large amounts of carbon emissions. In the U.S. these materials could be used as filler material to help pad the underlying structure of walls, says Onyango. 

However, all these building method remain unpopular in the U.S. due to a combination of lack of skilled workers to procure natural materials and the reluctance of building developers to pay the additional costs associated with traditional architecture. 

“These methods are cheaper in the long run, but in the short run they may look expensive,” says Onyango. Building developers may be unwilling to pay the extra costs associated with traditional materials and structural designs. However, in the long run, because the building owner will pay much less for air conditioning, owners would usually save money, says Onyango. 

But as temperatures climb, U.S. cities are going to have to make changes. Cities like Los Angeles and New York have gone to great lengths to repaint rooftops of existing buildings white over the last 15 years in an attempt to reduce heat. Others, like Miami, are planting new trees, which can help reduce temperatures by up to 10 degrees with enough foliage.  Borrowing techniques from cities long used to living in hot climates only make sense.

source https://time.com/6298837/hot-cities-middle-eastern-architecture/

How The Witcher Season 3 Bids Farewell to Star Henry Cavill

Warning: This post contains spoilers for the final three episodes of The Witcher season 3.

The final three episodes of The Witcher season 3 arrived on Netflix on Thursday, bringing with them the end of Henry Cavill’s time as titular monster-hunter Geralt of Rivia. Going forward, Liam Hemsworth will take over as Geralt in the popular fantasy series.

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“My journey as Geralt of Rivia has been filled with both monsters and adventures, and alas, I will be laying down my medallion and my swords for season 4,” Cavill wrote on Instagram when the news of the casting switch broke last October. “In my stead, the fantastic Mr. Liam Hemsworth will be taking up the mantle of the White Wolf. As with the greatest of literary characters, I pass the torch with reverence for the time spent embodying Geralt and enthusiasm to see Liam’s take on this most fascinating and nuanced of men.”

Judging by the way season 3 leaves things, Hemsworth will simply be stepping into the role as if nothing happened. Think Bryce Dallas Howard replacing Rachelle Lefevre as Victoria in the Twilight movies or Michiel Huisman replacing Ed Skrein as Daario Naharis in Game of Thrones–except this time, with the show’s main character.

That means that Geralt’s existing relationships with Yennefer of Vengerberg (Anya Chalotra), Princess Cirilla “Ciri” of Cintra (Freya Allan), and the rest of the Continent’s major players can continue to evolve from where they stand now.

How does The Witcher season 3 end?

The season 3 finale opens with Geralt, under the care of the dryads, still healing from the near-fatal wounds he received in his battle with Vilgefortz (Mahesh Jadu) in episode 6. However, he’s determined to get on his way as soon as possible as Jaskier (Joey Batey) has shown him an announcement put out by Nilfgaardian emperor Emhyr “The White Flame” var Emreis (Bart Edwards) that Ciri is on her way to Nilfgaard.

After the destruction at Aretuza, Yennefer is busy trying to prop up her mentor Tissaia (MyAnna Buring), who’s reeling after failing to see the truth about Vilegefortz and prevent the Thanedd Coup. Despite Yennefer’s reassurances, a distraught Tissaia ultimately kills herself. This leaves Yennefer to lead the remaining Aretuza mages, rallying them around the idea that it’s up to them to eliminate Vilgefortz.

Yennefer later visits Geralt and uses her powers to heal him, making him promise that it won’t be the last time they see each other. Geralt then sets out for Nilfgaard and quickly realizes that he can no longer be neutral if he wants to stand against evil. He sends a Nilfgaardian soldier ahead to Emhyr with the warning that “no matter his armies, no matter his walls, I will free Ciri.”

This is Cavill’s final scene in the episode, meaning that the next time we encounter Geralt, we’ll likely be looking at Liam Hemsworth.

Meanwhile, Ciri, who was transported through time and space to the Korath Desert after connecting with the immensely powerful monolith in Tor Lara, has been picked up by a band of headhunters eager to deliver her to Emhyr—who we now know is actually Ciri’s father Duny—for a hefty reward. Luckily for Ciri, she’s been kidnapped alongside a boy named Kayleigh (Fabian McCallum), a member of a young gang of outlaws known as the Rats, and his friends quickly show up to rescue them.

Ciri is forced to make her first human kill and ultimately ends up telling the Rats that her name is Falka, the name of the ancient princess and part-elf royal who appeared to her during her trials in the desert and goaded her into using fire magic before Ciri announced she was relinquishing her powers. Falka infamously led a rebellion against her own family before being burned at the stake.

“That last shot we see in season 3, she’s mourning and slightly shedding the Ciri we’ve known this entire time—that innocent dreamer Ciri,” Freya Allan told Netflix. “She doesn’t feel like Ciri anymore. She feels, suddenly, like Falka, this character she’s been talking to who’s very brutal and bloody and has killed so many people.”

As for the “Ciri” that was on her way to Nilfgaard, it turns out that Villegefortz, now disfigured from the explosion at the Tower Lor, brought a Ciri lookalike to Emhyr rather than the real Ciri. Emhyr appears skeptical, but presents her as the real princess by raising their hands together in front of all the Nilfgaardian nobles.

source https://time.com/6298126/witcher-season-3-ending/