Month: July 2018

Enlarge / Lake Huila records centuries of environmental change in the Quijos Valley. (credit: Nicholas Laughlin)

On the slopes of northern Ecuador's Quijo Valley, perpetual clouds shroud the canopy of a seemingly pristine tropical forest. But the beauty of the cloud forest hides a violent, tragic history. A new study of sediments from the valley's Lake Huila reveals centuries of indigenous agriculture that came to an abrupt end in warfare and fire around 1588.

Population collapse

From about 1400 to 1532, the Quijos Valley marked the eastern frontier of the Incan Empire. Although they were subjects of the empire, the people of the Quijos Valley maintained a distinct cultural identity from the Incas, and historical and archaeological records show that the valley was a conduit for trade between Incan territory and the peoples of the Amazon Basin.

The first Europeans to set foot in the Quijos Valley were Spanish expeditions in 1538 and 1541, who arrived in search of gold and cinnamon. They estimated that about 35,000 indigenous people lived in the region. By 1577, about 11,400 people had clustered around the Spanish town of Baeza, which the colonizers built in 1559 alongside the indigenous community of Hatunquijos. But by 1600, three out of four of these people were dead.

Enlarge / Here, have some antibiotics. (credit: Getty | Bloomberg)

Popular urgent care centers may be the biggest—and most overlooked—culprits in the dangerous overuse of antibiotics in clinics, according to a new analysis in JAMA Internal Medicine.

Based on insurance claims from patients with employee-sponsored coverage, researchers estimated that about 46 percent of patients who visited urgent care centers in 2014 for conditions that cannot be treated with antibiotics—such as a common cold that’s caused by a virus—left with useless antibiotic prescriptions that target bacterial infections. That rate of inappropriate antibiotic use is almost double the rate the researchers saw in emergency departments (25 percent) and almost triple the rate seen in traditional medical offices (17 percent).

The authors of the analysis—a team of researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the University of Utah, and the Pew Charitable Trusts—concluded that interventions for urgent care centers are “urgently needed.”

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings. (credit: JD Lasica)

Netflix missed its subscriber growth targets by about a million subscribers in the three months ending in June, sparking concern among investors that there might be a saturation limit for the streaming platform. The company's stock price fell 14 percent on the news, the BBC reports, although that came after an impressive run that saw the stock gaining much more value than that over the past year.

Netflix has 130 million subscribers globally. It had projected the addition of 6.2 million subscribers in the quarter, but it managed to get 5.2 million instead.

Some investors have seen Netflix as the future of television—a sure-to-be dominant hub for all our entertainment viewing. But the landscape is increasingly looking more like an unbundled version of the old cable model—dozens of channels from Netflix to CBS to Showtime, each with their own monthly fee. The economics of putting it all in one $8-15/month subscription service were never sustainable.

Google

There's a big update coming to the Google Assistant for iOS and Android today. Google is resurrecting the predictive Google Now cards that used to exist in the pre-assistant era, and the company is sticking them in the Google Assistant interface.

Before the transition to the Google Assistant and the Google (News) Feed, Google Now was one of the best parts of Android. This list of cards below the standard Google Search interface tried to show you information before you asked for it. This included things like travel times to your common places, upcoming appointments, flights, and the weather. Google Now would even do really smart things like tell you when to leave for an appointment based on the live traffic conditions between you and the appointment location. During the transition to the Google Assistant, these predictive cards were buried deeper in the UI, and eventually they just stopped showing up. Google ended up turning the card stream into a news article feed, and, for a while, there has been no way to see many of these predictive cards.