ILLUMINATING THE RICH AND VARIED LIFE OF NEW YORK CITY

 

 

 

Home2016 (Page 9)

March 2016

[caption id="attachment_15241" align="aligncenter" width="1168"] An artist's impression of gravitational waves generated by binary neutron stars. Credits: R. Hurt/Caltech-JPL[/caption] Gravitational waves from the collision of two black holes have come to Earth. This is not exactly a local story: The waves emanated from a galaxy far, far away—about a billion light years, to be more or less precise. But scientists from New York’s Columbia University are part of a team that detected the waves. What does all this mean? Muna Habib of NY City Lens spoke to one of the Columbia scientists, Imre Bartos, lead researcher and lecturer in the university’s Physics department.

New York City is famous for its motley sex life, illuminated, celebrated, and exploited in countless ways - but hidden within the predominantly sexually active culture is a budding population of people looking for relationships offering anything but sex. They identify as asexuals, or people who do not experience sexual attraction. At least twice a month, a group called Aces NYC (ace being short for asexual) meets up to socialize and discuss ace-related topics, with the overarching goal of building a stronger local community for asexuals. Among the dozen or so members at the latest meetup, the group was roughly

Almost 600 volunteers from the aid agency Islamic Relief USA distributed truckloads of water bottles over the past two months to residents of Flint, Michigan, a city in a state of emergency due to its contaminated drinking water. The group, a humanitarian aid agency, has joined other Muslim organizations and the American Red Cross in supplying clean drinking water, filters, and deployed teams of health workers to take blood tests and provide educational material to residents about the hazardous lead in the water. A generous donation of $100,000 by Islamic Relief USA purchased over 300,000 bottles of drinking water for the community in