#student apartments near Rutgers University

[better-new-brunswick-nj]

Student Apartments Near Rutgers University

Verve New Brunswick is a student apartment near Rutgers University. There are various floor plans available for studios, 2, 3, 4, and 5 bedrooms. The fully furnished apartments feature private bathrooms, hardwood-style floors, designer kitchens, flat-panel TVs, in-unit washing and dryers, Wi-Fi, gas, and more. Also, Verve New Brunswick community boasts a strong sense of togetherness with events like game nights and barbecues. Also, living off-campus helps to develop time management, organizational skills, and self-confidence. This apartment offers more space and privacy at a lower cost, with flexible lease terms and roommate options. Indeed, choosing a student apartment save money on housing costs while living a comfortable and convenient life. Contact (862) 244-1479 for more information.

Strong Job Market in New Brunswick, NJ

New Brunswick is known to have a strong job market with diverse employment opportunities across multiple sectors. The key industries driving the local economy include education, technology, healthcare, and finance. New Brunswick's strategic location between major urban centers like New York City and Philadelphia provides residents with access to a wider range of job opportunities. This allows them to benefit from the bustling economies of these cities while enjoying the advantages of a smaller community. In addition, the presence of respected institutions, most especially the Rutgers University greatly enhances the local economy. This prestigious university not only provides a wealth of educational resources and research initiatives but also contributes to job creation in both academic and administrative roles.

Historic Downtown New Brunswick

Historic Downtown New Brunswick gives a vibrant and charming atmosphere. With these cobblestone streets, historic buildings, and diverse shops and restaurants, the downtown area indeed provides a unique shopping and dining experience. The visitors can explore boutique stores, art galleries, and antique shops or simply relax at a cozy café. This area also hosts different events and festivals throughout the year, which create a lively and festive atmosphere. Whether you're looking for a leisurely stroll or a fun night out, this Historic Downtown New Brunswick has something for everyone.

$100 Million Budget for Rutgers University

New Jersey leaders have agreed to allocate $100 million of taxpayers' money to Rutgers University in the upcoming state budget in order to fund the renovation of the aging basketball arena and the start of a multimillion-dollar indoor football practice facility. The said funding will also be used to fund the university's medical schools and a $50 million research complex being built in downtown New Brunswick. The deal was quietly hammered out last week and is expected to help fund the renovation of the state school's athletic facilities. I think that this fund is going to help a lot.

Link to Map Driving Direction

Museum at Buccleuch Mansion inside park, 200 College Ave, New Brunswick, NJ 08901, United States

Head southwest 492 ft

Turn right 259 ft

Turn right 0.1 mi

Turn left 0.2 mi

Turn right toward Easton Ave 400 ft

Turn left onto Easton Ave 0.7 mi

Verve New Brunswick 88 Easton Ave, New Brunswick, NJ 08901, United States

[driverdefens]

Discover Cutting-Edge Living in the Best Student Apartments in New Brunswick

Turn dorm life into home life. Verve, a newly constructed student housing near Rutgers University, is situated on Easton Avenue, steps from campus. These ample New Brunswick apartments provide a complete lifestyle with cutting-edge amenities & more!

[nightmare-afton-cosplay]

College Town Crisis: As Schools Go Online, Students Are Stuck in Ironclad Leases

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In January, Rita Slavin‘s daughter signed an ironclad lease on an apartment near the University of California, Davis, to secure housing for her senior year of college. There was no way Slavin could have known that just a few months later her daughter Nicole‘s college classes would be held entirely online. She also had no clue that she would be suffering financially, or that Nicole and her roommate would have lost their jobs as the coronavirus pandemic plunged the nation into a recession.

Now the young women are trapped for the next year in a $2,020-a-month lease, which began in September. And they can’t get out of the contract unless they can find new tenants to take their place.

“I’m definitely losing sleep over this one,” says Slavin, 54, a paralegal who lives in Los Angeles. “It’s really rough because so many kids are stuck with these leases they desperately can’t get out of. It’s nearly impossible to find someone to take over a lease when everyone’s trying to get out of a lease. We’re even offering incentives such as free furniture, we will pay the first month’s rent—anything we can think of to make it more appealing.”

The students moved out of the apartment in April when the school first moved classes online in response to the COVID-19 crisis. That means they’ll be paying nearly a year-and-a-half’s rent on housing they’re not occupying.

Slavin’s plight isn’t unique. Across the country, many college students signed leases months in advance of the fall semester, expecting to return to school for in-person classes. Unfortunately, things often haven’t played out that way.

Some schools, including Harvard and Rutgers, along with the entire University of California system, announced this summer they would be predominantly online for the fall semester. Other schools, like the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Michigan State University, changed course and announced they would go online for the rest of the semester only after students began returning and a surge of positive COVID-19 cases followed.

That’s left many students scrambling to get out of pricey leases. In some some cities, roommates can be charged $750 to $2,000 a bedroom. In some areas, a four-bedroom house could go for $6,000 or $7,000 a month, says San Francisco–based tenants rights attorney Joseph Tobener.

“We’re talking about significant sums of money,” says Tobener, who receives about 20 calls a week now from students and their families.

Typically, a single renter or group of roommates sign the lease, which can be co-signed by one or more of the students’ families to guarantee it. So if other students decide not to move in or pay their share for the apartment, the student and the family on the lease can be on the hook for the full monthly rent—unless new renters are found. While some students kicked off campus prefer to stay with their friends near their schools, many others are heading home to their families.

Getting out of these contracts can be nearly impossible without a force majeure clause—basically an act of God clause—written into the original lease. Few contracts contain such a clause, and going to court is expensive, especially if the lease requires the tenants to pay their landlord’s attorney fees.

But Tobener doesn’t blame the building owners, who are faced with losing money on vacant units if they let tenants out of their contracts.

“The landlords often save up for years to buy units in these college towns, thinking it’s going to be a stable source of income, and then the bottom falls out,” says Tobener. “Nobody could have predicted this.”

In busy college towns like Davis, signing a lease in January or February is the only way most students can guarantee housing for the fall semester. Before the pandemic there was typically only a 0.5% to 1% rental vacancy, says Davis-area real estate broker Eugene Chang of College Town Realty. He specializes in rentals and property management.

However, with classes being held online there are now plenty of apartments and rental houses to choose from. He expects the vacancy rate to hit 10% by October. As a result of the lower demand, prices are falling. Tenants desperate to sublease their units are offering to pay $500 to $700 of the monthly rent to attract folks to take their spots.

“Because of the pandemic, fewer people want to live with strangers,” says Chang. “And fewer people are looking.”

In Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina senior Philecia Klein, 21, doesn’t know if she’ll be able to get out of her lease for her two-bedroom apartment in a subdivided house near the university. The public relations major had lined up a few roommates who all later fell through because they were nervous about committing to housing during the pandemic.

She signed the lease solo this spring and moved into the apartment in July. Last month, the school announced that in-person classes would be moved online after a COVID-19 outbreak.

Her father is liable for the full $1,040 a month, although Klein plans to pay him back. However, she doesn’t want to owe her father a year’s worth of rent when she can’t physically go to class and she can live at home for free. She also doesn’t want to be “stuck in the craziness of coronavirus” in the college town.

“There’s no hope in finding someone to fill that second bedroom now, so I might as well move home,” says Klein.

She’s not optimistic her father will be able to get out of the lease, but she still has mixed feelings about moving: “It hurts my soul to think I could leave this apartment.”

The post College Town Crisis: As Schools Go Online, Students Are Stuck in Ironclad Leases appeared first on Real Estate News & Insights | realtor.com®.

from https://www.realtor.com/news/trends/college-students-stuck-in-leases/

[sciencespies]

Influential electrons? Physicists uncover a quantum relationship

https://sciencespies.com/physics/influential-electrons-physicists-uncover-a-quantum-relationship/

Influential electrons? Physicists uncover a quantum relationship

Credit: CC0 Public Domain

A team of physicists has mapped how electron energies vary from region to region in a particular quantum state with unprecedented clarity. This understanding reveals an underlying mechanism by which electrons influence one another, termed quantum “hybridization,” that had been invisible in previous experiments.

The findings, the work of scientists at New York University, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Rutgers University, and MIT, are reported in the journal Nature Physics.

“This sort of relationship is essential to understanding a quantum electron system—and the foundation of all movement—but had often been studied from a theoretical standpoint and not thought of as observable through experiments,” explains Andrew Wray, an assistant professor in NYU’s Department of Physics and one of the paper’s co-authors. “Remarkably, this work reveals a diversity of energetic environments inside the same material, allowing for comparisons that let us spot how electrons shift between states.”

The scientists focused their work on bismuth selenide, or Bi2Se3, a material that has been under intense investigation for the last decade as the basis of advanced information and quantum computing technologies. Research in 2008 and 2009 identified bismuth selenide to host a rare “topological insulator” quantum state that changes the way electrons at its surface interact with and store information.

Studies since then have confirmed a number of theoretically inspired ideas about topological insulator surface electrons. However, because these particles are on a material’s surface, they are exposed to environmental factors not present in the bulk of the material, causing them to manifest and move in different ways from region to region.

The resulting knowledge gap, together with similar challenges for other material classes, has motivated scientists to develop techniques for measuring electrons with micron- or nanometer- scale spatial resolution, allowing researchers to examine electron interaction without external interference.

The Nature Physics research is one of the first studies to use this new generation of experimental tools, termed “spectromicroscopy”—and the first spectromicroscopy investigation of Bi2Se3. This procedure can track how the motion of surface electrons differs from region to region within a material. Rather than focusing on average electron activity over a single large region on a sample surface, the scientists collected data from nearly 1,000 smaller regions.

By broadening the terrain through this approach, they could observe signatures of quantum hybridization in the relationships between moving electrons, such as a repulsion between electronic states that come close to one another in energy. Measurements from this method illuminated the variation of electronic quasiparticles across the material surface.

“Looking at how the electronic states vary in tandem with one another across the sample surface reveals conditional relationships between different kinds of electrons, and it’s really a new way of studying a material,” explains Erica Kotta, an NYU graduate student and first author on the paper. “The results provide new insight into the physics of topological insulators by providing the first direct measurement of quantum hybridization between electrons near the surface.”

Explore further

A platform for stable quantum computing, a playground for exotic physics

More information: Spectromicroscopic measurement of surface and bulk band structure interplay in a disordered topological insulator, Nature Physics (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41567-019-0759-2 , https://nature.com/articles/s41567-019-0759-2

Provided by New York University

Citation: Influential electrons? Physicists uncover a quantum relationship (2020, January 13) retrieved 13 January 2020 from https://phys.org/news/2020-01-influential-electrons-physicists-uncover-quantum.html

This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.

#Physics

[biofunmy]

Forget Tanning Beds. College Students Today Want Uber Parking.

Such widespread upgrading of college student accommodations has occurred only twice before in the history of student housing design, said Carla Yanni, a professor of art history at Rutgers University and the author of “Living on Campus: An Architectural History of the American Dormitory.”

Rapid construction of luxurious fraternity houses came in the late 19th century, driven by rising competition for the nicest house, she said. In the early 20th century, universities began to realize that the fraternities were dominating campus social life and had housing that was far better than that of most students. “They wanted to offer a social alternative, and focused their energies on building dormitories,” Ms. Yanni said.

Now, the design of new student housing complexes is largely dictated by the university environment, the student body demographic and the local marketplace. But as overall student expectations are changing, developers and management companies are rethinking much of what they are delivering.

“The standard has become highly amenitized — almost all of our communities have fitness facilities and pools, game rooms,” Mr. Oltersdorf said. “But in the upgrades we’re doing and some of the new developments, there’s a more practical focus.”

For example, Campus Advantage, in a partnership with Stark Enterprises of Cleveland, is building a 618-bed apartment-style complex near the University of Florida in Gainesville that will have more than 3,000 square feet of study space in eight rooms when it opens in 2020. That’s four times the amount of study space Campus Advantage put into a project it built in Knoxville, Tenn., three years ago, said Madison Meier, the company’s vice president for business development.

Campus Advantage has also developed a package of less tangible amenities for its communities aimed at helping students succeed, including bringing in staff to critique résumés and take professional head shots, as well as reporting on-time rent payments to credit agencies to help students establish a credit score.

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[arlenis94]

Self-Reflection

From an early age, I have always had a passion driven desire to continue and further my education, particularly in the healthcare field. It essentially started with the dream of becoming a pediatrician but as I grew up I noticed that my life had a different purpose.As I continued my higher education at Rutgers University, I came to realize that what drove this passion was to help my community and make my parents proud. Due to personal experiences as well as coming from a disadvantaged socioeconomic background are a couple of reasons I decided to pursue a career in healthcare. Growing up in an urban Latino community where there is not much assistance for immigrants, there was and still is a great amount of people who do not have access to healthcare. This has led me to develop a great interest in Health Administration. I believe that with the passion and dedication I have for my academic goals, I will be able to provide that same passion into my professional career and make a difference when it comes to healthcare access.

I remember just last year my plan was to complete my undergraduate degree in Health Administration and Communication and pursue a career as an advocate for more healthcare access for everyone. As I continue to work on my Masters in Communication, I recently have started reflecting on my academic career and work for the past couple of years. I was accepted in the Rutgers MCIS/B.A program for Communication in April 2016 where I have gained many great insights from different courses to being a program assistant and teaching assistant at SCI. When I first started the program, I automatically knew that I wanted to do the health communication track due to my interest in healthcare. I had the opportunity to complete my internship at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital (RWJUH) for my Health Administration major. I closely worked with Post-Anesthesia Care Unit’s (PACU) director, Marlene Thompson, who was a great mentor and guided me every step of the way. Through this internship, I was able to gain advocacy, organizational, and teamwork skills that will help me in the long run of reaching my ultimate goal of more healthcare access. Not only that but, I have gained a strong sense of management and various aspects of working within the healthcare field.

Moreover, while an undergraduate student at Rutgers I have come across a handful of obstacles as well as opportunities. I have learned a lot about myself including what I am most passionate about when it comes to my academic and career objectives. My educational goal as mentioned above was to receive a Bachelor of Science in Health Administration and pursue a higher education with a Master’s degree in Communication through the Dual B.A and M.C.I.S program. I decided to pursue these two academic career paths because I believe that health administration and communication work well together and are more related than people would think. For example, during my internship in RWJUH I learned that one of the hospital’s major issues is the lack of communication between staff. Most specifically, not only is lack of communication a challenge but also miscommunication between staff. For my future job, a potential project or research could be to focus on strategies/methods that can reduce this communication barrier and increase staff communication skills.

Aside from my academic career, I had various other experiences which I am grateful for. During my summer breaks from Rutgers, I became more involved in my community by volunteering at Hackensack UMC Palisades. I had the opportunity to work in both the Employee Health Department and Transportation Services. While volunteering at the Transportation Services Department, I realized that there were various measures considered when helping those who did not have access to care and they were willing to go beyond their call of duty to help the community. Additionally, I worked as a Customer Service Representative at ACME markets. Although this job is not necessarily health care related, it has helped me gained a great amount of administrative work and made me realize that I chose the right career path of health administration. Another job which I hold close to my heart is residence life. As an Apartment Assistant, I have been able to see my residents grow, develop, and learn through community development and programming. Having the chance to be part of their journey as students and/or professionals and be part of their success makes me love this job the most. It has been one of the best learning experiences that I will keep in my mind and will use in the near future as I prepare to go into the real-world.

I can most definitely say that pursuing a Masters in the Communication field has had a positive impact on my career choice. I have come across many faculty members in the Communication department that have been outstanding and very helpful throughout my educational career, in particular, Dr. Meara Faw. Dr. Faw was a great asset to my career choice as well as my academic goals while pursuing my Masters during my junior and senior year of college. One of the reasons Dr. Faw had such an influence on me as a student was due to the fact that her research resides on interpersonal communication and health. Unfortunately, Dr. Faw left Rutgers and I was not able to collaborate with her on her research. However, I know that if I had the opportunity to work with Dr. Faw whether it was as her research assistant or her as my mentor for capstone, I would have learned various insight/knowledge from her health-oriented research. Overall, applying and being accepted into Dual B.A and M.C.I.S program has been a predominant step in achieving my academic and career goals.

With that being said, as I go into the final stretch of my academic career I found myself thinking about the future and where I want to be in the next 20 years and so on. I can honestly say that if I were asked the question of where do I saw myself in the next 20 years during an interview beforehand I would fail since I haven’t really given it much though until recently. I can imagine in a couple of years from now I have passed all my courses and graduated with my Masters in Communication from Rutgers University. Hopefully I have gained the acquired soft skills to land a job as a Healthcare Administrator and a career at a well know hospital or healthcare company. I hope that through the years of experience I have gained that I will be able to have an impact on those I work with and those around me. I want to be able to leave a mark that people will remember and say that I was able to help the community at large and make a difference during my career.

Moreover, I see myself owning a home, with a nice backyard that has garden and married with children. Not only that but, I definitely want to make sure that they have the stability and security to continue to live a peaceful life until it is time for me to pass onto another life. I hope to be a lot less stressed and retired while I enjoy my last living years in my own house as I spend it with my family. I also hope to see myself relaxed where I have time to socialize with friends, watch television, surface the web, and take long naps. During my retirement, I hope to have taken life seriously and made responsible and educated choices. Additionally, I hope that I accomplished all my goals as far as educational and career goals and that I have no regrets whatsoever. I want to be able to look back and say I did everything right and how I wanted it to be without regretting why I did what I did. Eventually, I will embrace the struggles that I went through, hoped that I learned from them, and teach my children to learn from my own mistakes.

Overall, I hope that I had a solid relationship with my partner, financially comfortable, and have a home I love with my family. Since I know that these things aren't always guaranteed, I will not beat myself up about it if things aren't the exact way I imagined they would be. I hope that when I am ninety, if I get to live that long, that wherever I am and whoever I'm with that I am happy. Life isn't easy but I'll do my best to make the right choices and be the best sister, daughter, professional, and friend I can possibly be, because that's what is truly important. I want to look back and say that I'm proud of what I've accomplished. Therefore, I want to look back and say I would do it all over again if I could.

[genevievewrites]

Chapter One - Ready to Launch

I heard once on NPR that our memories can’t be trusted. This is especially true for the ones we revisit the most. Because every time we recall a moment from our past, it gets a little less true. Through the process of bringing back that memory, we are changing it without even realizing that we do. 

I don’t completely trust this story, because I have told it so many times. It’s one of those touch stones in my life that I use to contextualize who I have turned out to be. 

In my story, I am ten. My parents, who got me tested as a kindergardener to ensure I was in the gifted and talented class, and who were at this moment in the process of figuring out how to use the magnet program to make sure I could attend a better middle school than the one in our neighborhood, sat me down. They told me that they couldn’t afford to send me to college, so it was up to me. I needed to work very hard, get good grades, and get a scholarship. So, I did. 

In fifth grade, my teacher, Mrs. Barbee, asked us all to draw rocket ships and write our dreams on them. I don’t remember what any of my classmates wrote, but I do remember mine. I wanted to graduate with an International Baccaleureate diploma, and I wanted to become a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist. 

That is a lot of pressure for a young person just starting middle school. 

Now, I’m twenty-nine. I did not get an IB diploma, because I was too busy being a Drum Major in the marching band, a lead in the one act play, the president of the French Club, and working on my near-perfect GPA. I also did not become a journalist. By the time I got that full tuition scholarship to a small liberal arts school a few hours from my home town, many more dreams had come and gone. More would soon come to take their place. One thing was constant - I was going to do something truly remarkable. Something I cared about. Something that mattered. 

I kept a card my aunt sent me when I graduated high school, because it spoke to the core of my being. “Where your talents and the needs of the world cross, there lies your vocation.” 

Thanks for nothing, Aristotle.  *** My last semester of college - which I would finish in four years, debt free - was when my carefully constructed life plan would start to unravel. I didn’t realize it then, but as I embarked on a graduate degree in Women’s and Gender Studies that was supposed to propel me into wild success as an academic whose true passion was molding young minds and creating the feminist future, I was beginning to fall apart. 

There were things I had expected to happen while I was in college that never came to pass. I hadn’t met the love of my life. In fact, I was graduating totally single. I had found plenty of love, and like, and lust on that small campus in the city. But no one who stuck like they were supposed to. 

I didn’t feel especially enlightened or grown up. I felt more like a child than I had when I’d arrived - an eighteen year old full of that grating self-assurance that they know everything there is to know about life before they’ve even started to live it. I had applied to graduate school with the intention of pursuing a doctoral degree and becoming an incredible feminist professor after writing an insightful dissertation on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the patriarchy slayer who lives in each of us. By the time I was actually heading off to school, the plan had changed again. 

I sold my car and all of my possessions that wouldn’t fit in my suitcase or my closet at my mom’s house. I wasn’t ever coming back, I told my friends and family. I was going to get my master’s degree in Women’s and Gender Studies, find an internship at a women’s rights nonprofit in New York City, and never look back. 

When I landed in New Jersey with one hundred pounds of luggage, I managed to find my way to New Brunswick by New Jersey transit. I grabbed a taxi from the train station and, proud of myself for making it alone across the country to start this new phase of my life, confidently told my taxi driver that I needed to go to Rutgers. 

“Which campus?” he asked me. 

“Campus?” I replied, confused by his question. 

“Yes, which campus do you need me to take you to?”

“I don’t know,” I said, panic beginning to set in, “I need to get my keys and ID card to move into my on campus housing.” 

Unlike my alma mater, a small school of 5,000 students landlocked to two square miles in the middle of a medium-sized city in Texas, my graduate school was a complicated maze of disconnected and sprawling campuses in multiple cities. I was far away from home and completely unprepared.

I somehow managed to figure out exactly which of Rutgers’ five campuses I was going to, and the address of a building where I could get the necessary key to open my room. It took so long for the patient cab driver and I to find the office, the after hours staff were the only ones there when I arrived. 

When I finally found the small house that I would live in, rolling all of my belongings in a hundred pound bubblegum-pink suitcase across the Cook/Douglass campus, I felt a huge wave of relief. I dropped my bags, pulled out my new key, and reached for the door - which didn’t have keyhole. Instead, I saw a card reader. I did not have a card. 

Since I had arrived after hours, I wasn’t able to take a picture and get the ID card that would have opened the front door of the house. I did have a key to my individual room, which I hoped one day I would get to see. 

It was hot, and late, and by this time my phone was dead. First, I sat down and cried like any twenty-two year old would do. Then, I walked to the house next door and knocked. 

In a stroke of pure luck, one of the girls had already moved in next door. And she was willing to let a perfect stranger use her cell phone to call the emergency after-hours number for graduate housing. They would bring me a temporary key card, but it would take about an hour. 

Maha helped me get my things on to my porch.  Then, she invited me into her house, where she gave me a glass of water while we watched TV and waited for my card to arrive. 

It was dark by the time the RA got around to dropping off the temporary card. I thanked Maha and finally opened the door to my on-campus graduate housing. 

I had selected a room in a small house, in a row of ten similar houses. This was the cheapest housing option for graduate students on campus. While I had my own room, I would be sharing a bathroom with the other two girls on my floor. Five of us were assigned to the house in total. I was the first to arrive. 

It seemed hot inside but I was starving. Finding the air conditioner would have to wait. I had assumed that New Brunswick would be an extension of New York City - compact, walkable, without the need for a car. I would eventually learn that the university had it’s own bus system that was complimentary for students, so we could travel between campuses and residential areas. But on that first night, I had no intention of leaving my house. I found the number for a pizza place in my welcome packet that the after-hours housing staff had given me with my room key and ordered a large pepperoni pizza. Then, I sat on my twin bed in my gray room in New Jersey and cried a little more. 

Once my tears had started to pool with my sweat, I thought it was time to figure out the air conditioning situation. There was no thermostat in my room. New Jersey may not be Texas, but that August day the temperature was in the high nineties, and it wasn’t cooling to much less. After a fruitless search of all the common areas, I realized that I hadn’t seen a single vent. My room had a radiator, which I only vaguely recognized from movies that took place in cities where snow actually stayed to accumulate on the ground, but no vent for conditioned air to blow through. 

I, a native Houstonian who had spent ten out of twelve months in icy air conditioned comfort for the last twenty-two years of my life, had moved into a house with no AC. 

Still reeling from the shock that there were buildings made without air conditioning, I opened the windows and moved my bed closer, hoping to catch a breeze. As I waited for my pepperoni pizza to arrive, a thunder storm rolled in. And that was when I learned that while the screen could keep out mosquitoes, it certainly didn’t guard against rain. 

My pizza arrived, expensive and unexceptional. I saved most of it, as I didn’t know how I was going to get to a store to buy food any time soon, and cried into a slice of pepperoni pizza as rain splattered the edge of my bed. 

What had I done? How had I made such a huge mistake? I was stuck there in New Jersey, in a sad room in an old house without air conditioning, far away from everything I knew and loved. 

While most of the buildings on the Cook/Douglass campus had recently been upgraded with wifi, these houses were the last on the list and I hadn’t thought to bring an ethernet cord with me to New Jersey. I didn’t even have the internet to distract me from my lonely, scared, exhaustion. 

I curled up in my bed, as close to the window as I could get without risking the rain, and thanked whatever gods were listening that I had all seven seasons of Buffy on DVD. Joss Whedon’s brilliance temporarily disctracted me from an unsettling truth - for the first time in my sheltered, Millennial life, I was not sure what was going to happen next. That first night, I cried myself to sleep. 

[driverdefens]

RU Student Apartments within Short Walking Distance

Verve offers the ultimate student apartment experience right on Easton Avenue, steps from Rutgers University in RU. Our newly built, spacious apartments are designed for today's students, featuring a state-of-the-art fitness center and more. Call now!

[driverdefens]

Off Campus Housing Essentials for Students in New Brunswick

Verve is the ultimate student haven and the epitome of New Brunswick off-campus housing perfection. Verve is Rutgers University's premier address for modern living. Elevate your lifestyle with immense apartments, an inclusive fitness center, gaming zones, alfresco cooking, and exclusive study nooks.

[driverdefens]

Top Reasons to Choose Student Apartments in New Brunswick NJ

Verve is a newly constructed, high-quality student housing for Rutgers University, situated on Easton Avenue, just a stone's throw from the campus. They offer spacious apartments with amenities like a state-of-the-art fitness center, gaming spaces, outdoor kitchen, and individual and group study rooms. Discover your ideal student lifestyle now!

[driverdefens]

Student Apartments New Brunswick NJ Suitable for College Athletes Rooming Together

Verve offers premier student apartments in New Brunswick, NJ, adjacent to Rutgers University. Experience modern living on Easton Avenue, steps away from campus. Enjoy spacious, stylish apartments with top-notch amenities: a fitness center, gaming areas, outdoor kitchen, study rooms, and more.

[sciencespies]

Is theory on earth's climate in the last 15 million years wrong?

https://sciencespies.com/environment/is-theory-on-earths-climate-in-the-last-15-million-years-wrong/

Is theory on earth's climate in the last 15 million years wrong?

Left: Large coccoliths – disks made of calcium carbonate that armor single-celled algae called coccolithophores – from the Middle Miocene about 16 million to 11.6 million years ago. Right: Small coccoliths from the Pleistocene about 2.6 million to 11,700 years ago. Credit: Weimin Si

More

A key theory that attributes the climate evolution of the Earth to the breakdown of Himalayan rocks may not explain the cooling over the past 15 million years, according to a Rutgers-led study.

The study in the journal Nature Geoscience could shed more light on the causes of long-term climate change. It centers on the long-term cooling that occurred before the recent global warming tied to greenhouse gas emissions from humanity.

“The findings of our study, if substantiated, raise more questions than they answered,” said senior author Yair Rosenthal, a distinguished professor in the Department of Marine and Coastal Sciences in the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. “If the cooling is not due to enhanced Himalayan rock weathering, then what processes have been overlooked?”

For decades, the leading hypothesis has been that the collision of the Indian and Asian continents and uplifting of the Himalayas brought fresh rocks to the Earth’s surface, making them more vulnerable to weathering that captured and stored carbon dioxide—a key greenhouse gas. But that hypothesis remains unconfirmed.

Lead author Weimin Si, a former Rutgers doctoral student now at Brown University, and Rosenthal challenge the hypothesis and examined deep-sea sediments rich with calcium carbonate.

Over millions of years, the weathering of rocks captured carbon dioxide and rivers carried it to the ocean as dissolved inorganic carbon, which is used by algae to build their calcium carbonate shells. When algae die, their skeletons fall on the seafloor and get buried, locking carbon from the atmosphere in deep-sea sediments.

If weathering increases, the accumulation of calcium carbonate in the deep sea should increase. But after studying dozens of deep-sea sediment cores through an international ocean drilling program, Si found that calcium carbonate in shells decreased significantly over 15 million years, which suggests that rock weathering may not be responsible for the long-term cooling.

Meanwhile, the scientists—surprisingly—also found that algae called coccolithophores adapted to the carbon dioxide decline over 15 million years by reducing their production of calcium carbonate. This reduction apparently was not taken into account in previous studies.

Many scientists believe that ocean acidification from high carbon dioxide levels will reduce the calcium carbonate in algae, especially in the near future. The data, however, suggest the opposite occurred over the 15 million years before the current global warming spell.

Rosenthal’s lab is now trying to answer these questions by studying the evolution of calcium and other elements in the ocean.

Explore further

Study finds big increase in ocean carbon dioxide absorption along West Antarctic Peninsula

More information: Reduced continental weathering and marine calcification linked to late Neogene decline in atmospheric CO2, Nature Geoscience (2019). DOI: 10.1038/s41561-019-0450-3 , https://nature.com/articles/s41561-019-0450-3

Provided by Rutgers University

Citation: Is theory on earth’s climate in the last 15 million years wrong? (2019, September 23) retrieved 23 September 2019 from https://phys.org/news/2019-09-theory-earth-climate-million-years.html

This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.

#Environment

[sciencespies]

Ozone threat from climate change

https://sciencespies.com/environment/ozone-threat-from-climate-change/

Ozone threat from climate change

UD’s Cristina Archer is a professor in the College of Earth, Ocean and Environment, with a joint appointment between the Physical Ocean Science and Engineering (POSE) program of the School of Marine Science and Policy and the Department of Geography. Credit: University of Delaware

  Increasing temperatures due to climate change will shift climatic conditions, resulting in worse air quality by increasing the number of days with high concentrations of ozone, according to a new journal article on air quality throughout the Mid-Atlantic region from researchers at the University of Delaware’s College of Earth, Ocean and Environment(CEOE).

  Cristina Archer led a team from CEOE as the members compiled nearly 50 years’ worth of data from Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control (DNREC) air monitoring and climate models to analyze climatic trends. They found that rising temperatures will increase the number of days in a year where ozone levels in Earth’s lower atmosphere become dangerous.

Archer said DNREC, which funded her study, is concerned with near-ground ozone levels for two main reasons: impacts on human health and compliance with federal and state regulations limiting high-ozone concentrations. 

“Ozone has large negative impacts on health, especially affecting the cardiopulmonary and respiratory systems,” Archer said. “It is especially bad if you already have a respiratory condition, asthma, for example, or an infection. In Delaware, we are barely in attainment or slightly in non-attainment (of ozone regulations). When we are not in attainment, the Environmental Protection Agency has to act. That is the relevance. That is why we need to know now there is a problem, so we can act on it.”

The study, titled “Global Warming Will Aggravate Ozone Pollution in the U.S. Mid-Atlantic,” was recently published in the Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology. 

Archer is a professor in CEOE with a joint appointment between the Physical Ocean Science and Engineering (POSE) program of the School of Marine Science and Policy and the Department of Geography. Collaborators in the research and writing were Sara Rauscher, an associate professor in the Department of Geography, and Joseph Brodie, a former graduate student and postdoctoral researcher at CEOE who is currently director of atmospheric research at the Rutgers University Center for Ocean Observing Leadership.

Ozone in the upper atmosphere is beneficial for blocking harmful ultraviolet (UV) rays from the sun. However, ozone closer to the surface of the Earth—the focus of the study—can lead to pulmonary complications among the population. Near-ground ozone can lead to coughing, irritation of the throat and chest, exacerbation of asthma, inflammation of lung cells, aggravation of chronic lung diseases, and ozone even reduces the disease-fighting capabilities of the immune system. On days where ozone levels are high enough, prolonged exposure can even lead to permanent lung damage. Ozone is regulated as a pollutant by the EPA because of ozone’s hazardous nature.

Near-ground ozone forms as a result of photochemical reactions between nitrogen oxides (NOx) and volatile organic compounds (VOCs). Intense UV rays from the sun are the catalyst for the reactions between NOx emissions and the VOCs. NOx emissions occur when cars or power plants burn fossil fuels such as coal and gasoline. VOCs are also man-made and derive from a variety of sources, including cars and gasoline-burning engines, paints, insecticides, cleaners, industrial solvents, and chemical manufacturing.

According to Archer, limiting ozone is difficult because it is a secondary pollutant. 

“There are primary pollutants that are emitted and there are secondary pollutants that form in the air,” said Archer. “Ozone is one of these [secondary pollutants]. You can’t go to a smokestack and measure the ozone coming out. You’ll get precursors or other compounds that form it but never ozone itself.”

Most of the time, near-ground ozone is not an issue for Delaware. As outlined in Archer’s paper, during the 1980s the average number of high-ozone days in Delaware was about 75, whereas by 2015 it was less than 20, decreasing by about two days every year due to stricter air quality regulations.

However, the team of researchers found that increasing temperatures due to climate change are threatening to reverse the decrease in near-ground ozone pollution and increase the number of days where surface ozone levels become dangerous. 

Conditions that lead to high-ozone days are typical of hot summer days.

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As global temperatures increase, summers will continue to get hotter and will lead to more days with high ozone concentrations. Archer also stated that more high-ozone days could also occur during the fall and spring, since increasing global temperatures will make those seasons warmer on average. According to the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change, global temperatures have increased by one degree Celsius as of 2019 and will increase by another one degree Celsius by the end of the 21st century. Archer also said high-ozone days themselves may become more intense due to increased ozone concentrations.

The increase in the number and intensity of high-ozone days is troubling because the adverse health effects impact anyone who spends ample time outdoors, including children and people who exercise outside. More people go outside more often during the summer, potentially increasing human exposure to dangerous levels of near-ground ozone.

In the article, Archer said that a “business as usual” approach will inevitably lead to a dangerous increase in high-ozone days. Archer said that the country needs stricter regulations if it is to limit the number of high-ozone days.

  Explore further

  How severe drought influences ozone pollution

More information: Cristina L. Archer et al. Global Warming Will Aggravate Ozone Pollution in the U.S. Mid-Atlantic, Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology (2019). DOI: 10.1175/JAMC-D-18-0263.1 

Provided by University of Delaware

  Citation: Ozone threat from climate change (2019, July 23) retrieved 23 July 2019 from https://phys.org/news/2019-07-ozone-threat-climate.html

This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.

  #Environment

[biofunmy]

Vegas as a Literary Hub? You Bet.

LAS VEGAS — On a recent very warm Saturday afternoon, just a few blocks northeast of a string of ramshackle chapels offering Elvis-themed weddings on Las Vegas Boulevard, the novelist Tommy Orange was discussing the critical reception given to “There There,” his polyphonic novel about contemporary Native Americans.

Orange was speaking at the third annual Believer Festival, three days of performances, panels and parties that are part of a burgeoning literary scene here. As high-low splits go, it is a tough scene to beat.

With irregular regularity, various places in the United States that are not the Big Obvious Centers start throwing off a more concentrated number of cultural sparks: Austin, Tex.; Seattle; Chapel Hill, N.C.; Atlanta. Las Vegas might not seem the most obvious place to join this list. The Strip is still, and ever shall be, as Joan Didion described it, “bizarre and beautiful in its venality and in its devotion to immediate gratification.” But a recent infusion of money, people and The Believer, a literary magazine, have kindled an already present bookish community into a steadier flame.

The hub of this resurgence (or, to coin a term, surgence) is the Black Mountain Institute, a literary center that operates out of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. When Joshua Wolf Shenk was named the executive and artistic director of the institute in 2015 — after the retirement of Carol Harter, who founded B.M.I. in 2006 — he was not planning to also become the editor in chief of a magazine. But soon after beginning his tenure, Shenk talked to The Believer, then published by McSweeney’s and based in San Francisco, about cooperating on a live event in Vegas.

Those talks grew into discussions about B.M.I. buying the magazine, which was in a dormant phase as it tried to find a viable long-term financial model. A deal was finalized in early 2017.

Shenk said that defying what outsiders expect from Vegas was no longer what interested him most, but he and others continually admit that the juxtapositions can be hard to ignore. And one person’s very conscious fight against stereotypes has done much to fund the growth.

Beverly Rogers, a patron saint of the arts in Vegas, moved to the area from outside Philadelphia when she was 12. Now 68, and a serious book collector, she remains motivated by the view others have of her longtime home.

“Since I was a kid, I had been sick of going back to my family and friends and have them make some snide remarks about living in Las Vegas, how there’s nothing intellectual going on here,” Rogers said. “I can’t tell you how many insults I suffered over the years. So I’ve always had what I call a desire to raise the cultural barometer of Las Vegas.”

The Rogers Foundation, which focuses on arts and education, pledged $10 million to B.M.I. in 2013. Not long after Rogers’s husband, Jim, an attorney and television station owner, died in 2014, the foundation pledged another $20 million to the institute, which now officially bears Rogers’s and Harter’s names.

“Everyone’s head is so full with the stereotype that I don’t think there’s any room for anything else,” Shenk said of Vegas. “There’s no substitute for coming here. You have to move through the environment to get a sense of what it’s actually like.”

The festival heavily emphasizes environment, staging its events against backdrops that are away from the Strip but still quintessentially Vegas — in both artificial and natural senses. The opening night, with readings by Kiese Laymon, Hanif Abdurraqib, Natalie Diaz and others, was held at the Neon Museum’s Ne10 Studio, a dark warehouse space strewn with classic signs. Near the entrance, a larger-than-life reclining cowgirl kicked her blazing boot into the air. On Friday night, just outside the city, readers performed in Red Rock Canyon at sunset, holding their own in a contest for attention with the glowing mountains.

Both the lineup of talent and the crowds at the festival reflected a city that, it is often said, is what 21st-century America looks like.

“The stereotype of Vegas is all white dudes swinging into the Strip and treating the city as a plaything for their imaginations,” Shenk said. “But the real city is incredibly diverse.”

Talk to a dozen people in Vegas, and 13 of them will tell you that U.N.L.V. is the most ethnically diverse campus in the country, as ranked by U.S. News & World Report. (Some will quickly acknowledge that, technically, the school is tied with Rutgers.)

The journalist Amanda Fortini has spent the better part of four years in Vegas, as a visiting lecturer at U.N.L.V. and, for the past few months, a B.M.I. fellow.

“There’s one misperception that Las Vegas is the Strip, that they’re an equivalent thing,” Fortini said. “But another misperception is that there’s this organic, local community wholly separate from the Strip — that there’s no cross-pollination between the two.”

For Justin Favela, a Vegas-born artist who appeared at this year’s festival, the city’s outsize dimensions help to spur his vision. “Most of my work is inspired by Las Vegas,” he said. “The colors that I use; the scale. I’m not afraid to make giant, obnoxious things that take up space and draw attention.”

The Believer is not an outsize magazine — its average issue sells 6,000 copies, including paid subscribers and in bookstores — but it is an influential and well-branded one. Sara Ortiz, the program manager for the magazine and B.M.I., moved to Vegas not long after she had returned to her hometown, Austin, from New York. Certain she was back in Texas for good, she said she was lured away in large part by the “name recognition” of the magazine.

Now, in addition to planning the festival, Ortiz coordinates about 50 events year-round for B.M.I. and oversees the institute’s many fellowships, including its City of Asylum program, which hosts writers who face censorship, and sometimes violence directed at them, in their home countries. The Egyptian journalist and novelist Ahmed Naji recently began his term as the City of Asylum fellow, and will be in Vegas for at least two years.

The final day of this year’s festival featured a series of signings and talks, including the interview with Orange, at The Lucy, a recently opened mixed-use complex owned by the Rogers Foundation that serves as a home for the B.M.I. crowd.

On ground level at the complex is The Writer’s Block, a store that bumped its stock from about 5,000 books at a previous location to about 20,000 in the current one. On the upper floors are apartments for B.M.I. fellows and any Believer editors who live outside Vegas full-time but spend stretches there to work on the magazine.

When Scott Seeley and his husband, Drew Cohen, who own and run The Writer’s Block, were first thinking of where to relocate from New York in 2013, Vegas “was not even on the radar,” Seeley said.

Seeley is an artist who designed two visually distinctive stores for McSweeney’s in Park Slope. For 10 years, he also ran 826NYC, the nonprofit founded by Dave Eggers that offers free creative-writing programs to children. In Vegas, Seeley has started his own program, Codex, for students from ages 5 to 18.

It is an irony not lost on him that, having been at ground zero of the McSweeney’s-flavored Brooklyn moment at the start of this century, he moved to the desert for a change of pace — only to have The Believer move in upstairs.

But he is happy to have the magazine around, and the scene finding him again has helped his business in more ways than one. “Publishers had been reticent to send authors to Vegas because books never sold,” Seeley said. “The Believer coming here legitimized this city in the eyes of the machine out there.”

So far, any new attention from the machine has not changed the fundamental tone of the place.

When the comedian and musician Reggie Watts closed the Red Rock Canyon event with a riotous set that included him adopting the persona of a pretentious poet, there was a ripple of surprise and almost relief that someone was having such unabashed fun. The local participants and audience members at the festival betrayed few pretensions, but there was an unquestionably sincere vibe throughout the weekend.

“My theory is that everything attracts its shadow,” Shenk said, “and that quite unconsciously, people who live in Las Vegas have developed a way of being that is in 180-degree contrast to the stereotypes of their city. It’s a relentlessly earnest, authentic, sometimes painfully earnest place. It’s not an ironic place. People are not commenting on the comment.”

In this way, the city is a perfect match for The Believer. In a long essay, much talked about at the time, that anchored its debut issue in 2003, Heidi Julavits wrote: “Snark is a reflexive disorder, whether those who employ it realize it or not,” and that the real questions we need to ask are: “What do you believe in? What do you care about?” These are questions that permeated this year’s festival, which had the theme of “La Frontera,” or the border, and featured several readings and conversations revolving around issues of social justice and the history of oppressed peoples.

“Thank you, believers,” the author Lolita Hernandez said as she took the stage at Red Rock Canyon, “for keeping believing.”

So, how to keep on keeping the faith? “We’re in many ways still a baby festival,” Ortiz said. “We’ve learned that we really do well with an intimate crowd. I don’t ever want us to get on the scale of something crazy-large.”

Shenk said the festival was thinking about “how to expand without losing the thing that people want us to expand.”

The long-term future of the whole scene depends on not just artists, but on much more fundamental things — like water. “If Lake Mead holds up, we can all be here long term,” Fortini said, with a dark laugh.

Some of the parched city’s other potential drawbacks are less apocalyptic in scale. The author Lesley Nneka Arimah, a fellow at B.M.I. this spring, said she was trying to figure out where she would live next. And while she has enjoyed her time in Vegas, there are features she could do without. “Tarantula season is July,” she said. “I’ve been foolishly soliciting tarantula stories from people.”

But the overall sense is of a creative community with plenty of room left in its growth spurt. More than one person compared Vegas to the Wild West, not for its zaniness or licentiousness, but because its culture’s clay is still wet.

“The first Believer Festival, at the first activity, I started to cry,” Rogers said. “I realized it was because I didn’t know anyone. Everyone there was young. I’m in this crowd, I see the same people all the time. These were people who were really interested in what was going on, and I didn’t know them.”

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