What Happened When Microsoft Analyzed Its Own Remote Work Patterns?

Harvard Business Review just published a new analysis by the director of Microsoft’s Workplace Analytics team, a director on Microsoft’s workplace intelligence team, and the editor of Microsoft Workplace Insights. “Four months ago we realized that our company, like so many others, was undergoing an immediate and unplanned shift to remote work…” “So, we launched an experiment to measure how the…

CDC Warns of Increasingly Aggressive Rodents Looking For New Food Sources

New submitter Way Smarter Than You shares a report from The Seattle Times: Humans aren’t the only ones hankering for the days they could dine out at their cities’ restaurants: Some rats that miss feasting on the scraps are becoming increasingly brazen to find new food sources, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned Thursday. Amid stay-home restrictions set across…

Pet food can contain drug-resistant bacteria that may pass to humans

Some dogs and cats may be passing gut microbes to their owners that withstand last-resort antibiotics, which can be needed to fight off pneumonia from a coronavirus infection Source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2241580-pet-food-can-contain-drug-resistant-bacteria-that-may-pass-to-humans/?utm_campaign=RSS%7CNSNS&utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=RSS&utm_content=home…

Amazon’s Shifting Definition of What Is ‘Essential’

Maddy Varner, reporting for The Markup: On March 17, Amazon informed U.S. sellers that it would no longer accept nonessential products at its warehouses. To the casual shopper, it might have sounded similar to the pledges Amazon has made in Italy, France, and India to stop taking orders from customers entirely for nonessential goods. But examining the fine print reveals that…

Scientists Identify Microbe That Could Help Degrade Polyurethane-Based Plastics

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: German researchers report in the journal Frontiers in Microbiology that they have identified and characterized a strain of bacteria capable of degrading some of the chemical building blocks of polyurethane. The team out of Germany managed to isolate a bacterium, Pseudomonas sp. TDA1, from a site rich in brittle plastic waste that shows…

Top tips for feeding wild birds

It’s OK to feed wild birds. Here are some tips for doing it the right way from a wildlife ecologist. Source: https://earthsky.org/earth/top-tips-feeding-wild-birds…

Petnet’s Smart Pet Feeder Goes Offline For a Week, Can’t Answer Customers At All

The app-driven, cloud-connected “smart” pet feeder from Petnet recently suffered an outage that knocked units offline for a week, leaving pets hungry and customers angry. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from Ars Technica: Petnet began posting messages on Twitter on February 14 advising customers that some of its SmartFeeders “will appear offline,” although they still would nominally work to dispense…