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The sunniest study spaces on campus

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I like to always study in a well-lit space, preferably with natural sunlight. This is a characteristic that I share with sunflowers, which have a directional response to the sun and track sources of light.

Moderate exposure to sunlight can have health benefits, such as strengthening the immune system and elevating our mood. I always feel happier and more motivated to study when I am close to a window or in a space with plenty of sunlight. I find natural light especially helpful when I’ve only had a few hours of sleep the night before. Seeing the sun shine helps me stay awake to finish my schoolwork.

I arrive on campus early in the morning for classes or to study, and I leave late when it is already dark. This is particularly the case during winter when there are fewer hours of light in the day. Other than the time I spend outside walking to class, I do not get to enjoy much sunlight. This is why I try to study and have lunch in places where I can stay warm by being inside but still enjoy the sun’s rays.

An extra benefit of these study spaces is that many are connected by pedways, so you can visit several (and even go to class) without having to walk outside!

CAB (central Academic Building)

First floor (near Main Quad entrance)

  • Two Tim Hortons close by – easy to grab a snack or drink while studying
  • Tables with sofas to study by yourself with plenty of space or to study together with a friend
  • Vending machines nearby

BONUS: View to Main Quad: You can enjoy the natural scenery of campus while studying, looking at the squirrels running up the trees, the birds flying by, the grass covered in green or white colours, and students passing by.

0 level (basement)

  • Tables with sofas right beside the windows
  • Tall tables and chairs with overhead lights for additional illumination
  • Plenty of outlets to charge your devices while studying
  • Vending machines and a small food court nearby

CAB – Cameron Pedway

  • Close to a Starbucks – easy to grab a coffee or a snack
  • Very close to an InfoLink booth, easy access to ask any questions about student life, campus groups or directions to different buildings
  • View of the different campus trees

CCIS (Centennial Centre for Interdisciplinary Science)

Main level

  • Sofas to study with friends or by yourself with plenty of space
  • View of the natural scenery of Main Quad
  • Near a Starbucks

BONUS: While studying, you can enjoy the scientific and artistic construction and exhibits in the building, such as the terrazzo floor designed by Scott Parsons and the Plesiosaur, a cretaceous sea monster spanning 50 feet from head to tail!

Level 2

  • View of the scale model of the solar system – the planets inspire imagination
  • View to part of Main Quad, with trees in sight

Cameron Library

Second floor

  • Collaborative space of the library to study with friends
  • Plenty of outlets available
  • Different types of furniture for diverse study needs
  • View to the natural scenery of trees, including tall pines

Fourth floor

  • Quiet study space for the times you need to concentrate
  • Individual study desk to avoid distractions
  • A section with plenty of outlets per individual desk
  • Individual desks in this section with computers available, which can be helpful when you need an additional screen to study or when you do not bring your laptop to campus

BONUS: One of my favourite places in this section is sitting close to the windows because I can directly get the sunrays, especially when it is too cold to go outside.

Agriculture/Forestry Centre

ALES atrium

  • One of my favourite study spots during the winter – it receives sunlight from all points and angles
  • A lot of plants and green decorations  (this space makes me feel that I am studying inside a greenhouse!)
  • You can enjoy watching even more plants by looking outside, with a view of plants and many pines
  • Vending machine close by

SUB (Student’s Union building)

Atrium and Stairs

  • Colourful bean bag chair sofas with outlets close by
  • Additional sofas to study with friends or enjoy lunch
  • Food court and vending machines close by

6th floor

  • Great view of all of campus – see the different buildings covered in snow or leaves
  • One of my favourite spots to study during sunrise and sunset times, as I can appreciate the different colours of the sky being on the higher floors of the building

ETLC (Engineering Teaching and Learning Complex)

ECERF (Electrical and Computer Engineering Research Facility) Level 2: Rooms W2 – 101 and W2 – 110

  • Space for quiet collaboration and studying
  • Tables and chairs with wheels to facilitate arranging the space for studying in groups or collaboration on a project
  • Parts of the room have a view of the road and trees – you can see birds standing on the branches
  • Plenty of outlets on the ground to charge your devices when necessary
  • A food court nearby that includes a Tim Horton’s

BONUS: There are whiteboards with wheels to move them around as necessary to draw diagrams while studying or explain a topic to your peers while reviewing for an exam. You can write on both sides of the whiteboard. (You need to bring your own markers and eraser.)

ETLC Level 2: Quiet Study Area

  • A quiet study space to study without distractions
  • Spacious tables with multiple chairs
  • Plenty of outlets
  • View to the natural scenery of the Engineering Quad

ECERF (near parkade elevator access)

  • View of trees to observe the squirrels and birds
  • Vending machines nearby
  • Close to the Engineering Geer Store
  • Various outlets available

ETLC Level 2: En Cana Engineering Learning Common

  • Large tables to study with plenty of space and enough room to collaborate with others
  • Multiple outlets at the tables and on the floor
  • Several sofas with tables for reading comfortably
  • View of the road and many of the trees – you can watch as they get covered with snow

Natural Resources Engineering Facility: Level 0 (basement)

  • Lots of sofas with tables
  • Several tall tables with chairs
  • In front of a Starbucks, so it is easy to grab a snack

DICE (Donadeo Innovation Centre for Engineering)

8th floor (near the Patrik D Daniel/Enbridge Engineering Conference Room)

  • Water fountain close by
  • View of the Engineering Quad

8th floor (near the Fred Pheasey Engineering CommonsFeaturing:

  • View of the River Valley and part of the city
  • Plenty of seating
  • One of my favourite places to study during sunrise and sunset hours — I am able to distinguish and neatly appreciate all the colours in the sky and how they change throughout the day

BONUS: This view of the river allows me to more deeply appreciate nature, which serves as a reminder to care for the environment and the animals that inhabit these places.

Rutherford Library

Second floor

  • Plenty of outlets available
  • View of all the natural scenery of the Arts and Business Quad
  • Collaborative space – you can study with your friends or work on group projects

ECHA (Edmonton Clinic Health Academy)

First Floor (near NE Entrance)

  • Starbucks nearby
  • View of the road – study scenery as you watch students and cars pass by

Second Floor

  • Tables and couches to adapt to all study needs
  • Large windows that allow a lot of sunshine to come in, even when it is cloudy outside
  • Desks with a division down the middle to study without distractions

Geoffrey and Robyn Sperber Health Sciences Library

First floor (near the entrance)

  • Quiet zone for studying without distractions
  • Outlets available in different locations
  • New study space in the recently inaugurated health sciences library

Business Building – Main Level

Carruthers Student Commons

  • Chairs and tables with wheels to move around
  • Plenty of outlets
  • Various sofas on the upper and main floor
  • View of the natural landscape of the Arts and Business Quads and view of part of the Old Arts Building
  • Collaborative spaces such as study rooms available, which can be a great space to work on team projects

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Here’s how Helene and other storms dumped a whopping 40 trillion gallons of rain on the South

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More than 40 trillion gallons of rain drenched the Southeast United States in the last week from Hurricane Helene and a run-of-the-mill rainstorm that sloshed in ahead of it — an unheard of amount of water that has stunned experts.

That’s enough to fill the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium 51,000 times, or Lake Tahoe just once. If it was concentrated just on the state of North Carolina that much water would be 3.5 feet deep (more than 1 meter). It’s enough to fill more than 60 million Olympic-size swimming pools.

“That’s an astronomical amount of precipitation,” said Ed Clark, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Water Center in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. “I have not seen something in my 25 years of working at the weather service that is this geographically large of an extent and the sheer volume of water that fell from the sky.”

The flood damage from the rain is apocalyptic, meteorologists said. More than 100 people are dead, according to officials.

Private meteorologist Ryan Maue, a former NOAA chief scientist, calculated the amount of rain, using precipitation measurements made in 2.5-mile-by-2.5 mile grids as measured by satellites and ground observations. He came up with 40 trillion gallons through Sunday for the eastern United States, with 20 trillion gallons of that hitting just Georgia, Tennessee, the Carolinas and Florida from Hurricane Helene.

Clark did the calculations independently and said the 40 trillion gallon figure (151 trillion liters) is about right and, if anything, conservative. Maue said maybe 1 to 2 trillion more gallons of rain had fallen, much if it in Virginia, since his calculations.

Clark, who spends much of his work on issues of shrinking western water supplies, said to put the amount of rain in perspective, it’s more than twice the combined amount of water stored by two key Colorado River basin reservoirs: Lake Powell and Lake Mead.

Several meteorologists said this was a combination of two, maybe three storm systems. Before Helene struck, rain had fallen heavily for days because a low pressure system had “cut off” from the jet stream — which moves weather systems along west to east — and stalled over the Southeast. That funneled plenty of warm water from the Gulf of Mexico. And a storm that fell just short of named status parked along North Carolina’s Atlantic coast, dumping as much as 20 inches of rain, said North Carolina state climatologist Kathie Dello.

Then add Helene, one of the largest storms in the last couple decades and one that held plenty of rain because it was young and moved fast before it hit the Appalachians, said University of Albany hurricane expert Kristen Corbosiero.

“It was not just a perfect storm, but it was a combination of multiple storms that that led to the enormous amount of rain,” Maue said. “That collected at high elevation, we’re talking 3,000 to 6000 feet. And when you drop trillions of gallons on a mountain, that has to go down.”

The fact that these storms hit the mountains made everything worse, and not just because of runoff. The interaction between the mountains and the storm systems wrings more moisture out of the air, Clark, Maue and Corbosiero said.

North Carolina weather officials said their top measurement total was 31.33 inches in the tiny town of Busick. Mount Mitchell also got more than 2 feet of rainfall.

Before 2017’s Hurricane Harvey, “I said to our colleagues, you know, I never thought in my career that we would measure rainfall in feet,” Clark said. “And after Harvey, Florence, the more isolated events in eastern Kentucky, portions of South Dakota. We’re seeing events year in and year out where we are measuring rainfall in feet.”

Storms are getting wetter as the climate change s, said Corbosiero and Dello. A basic law of physics says the air holds nearly 4% more moisture for every degree Fahrenheit warmer (7% for every degree Celsius) and the world has warmed more than 2 degrees (1.2 degrees Celsius) since pre-industrial times.

Corbosiero said meteorologists are vigorously debating how much of Helene is due to worsening climate change and how much is random.

For Dello, the “fingerprints of climate change” were clear.

“We’ve seen tropical storm impacts in western North Carolina. But these storms are wetter and these storms are warmer. And there would have been a time when a tropical storm would have been heading toward North Carolina and would have caused some rain and some damage, but not apocalyptic destruction. ”

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Follow AP’s climate coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/climate

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Follow Seth Borenstein on Twitter at @borenbears

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Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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‘Big Sam’: Paleontologists unearth giant skull of Pachyrhinosaurus in Alberta

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It’s a dinosaur that roamed Alberta’s badlands more than 70 million years ago, sporting a big, bumpy, bony head the size of a baby elephant.

On Wednesday, paleontologists near Grande Prairie pulled its 272-kilogram skull from the ground.

They call it “Big Sam.”

The adult Pachyrhinosaurus is the second plant-eating dinosaur to be unearthed from a dense bonebed belonging to a herd that died together on the edge of a valley that now sits 450 kilometres northwest of Edmonton.

It didn’t die alone.

“We have hundreds of juvenile bones in the bonebed, so we know that there are many babies and some adults among all of the big adults,” Emily Bamforth, a paleontologist with the nearby Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum, said in an interview on the way to the dig site.

She described the horned Pachyrhinosaurus as “the smaller, older cousin of the triceratops.”

“This species of dinosaur is endemic to the Grand Prairie area, so it’s found here and nowhere else in the world. They are … kind of about the size of an Indian elephant and a rhino,” she added.

The head alone, she said, is about the size of a baby elephant.

The discovery was a long time coming.

The bonebed was first discovered by a high school teacher out for a walk about 50 years ago. It took the teacher a decade to get anyone from southern Alberta to come to take a look.

“At the time, sort of in the ’70s and ’80s, paleontology in northern Alberta was virtually unknown,” said Bamforth.

When paleontogists eventually got to the site, Bamforth said, they learned “it’s actually one of the densest dinosaur bonebeds in North America.”

“It contains about 100 to 300 bones per square metre,” she said.

Paleontologists have been at the site sporadically ever since, combing through bones belonging to turtles, dinosaurs and lizards. Sixteen years ago, they discovered a large skull of an approximately 30-year-old Pachyrhinosaurus, which is now at the museum.

About a year ago, they found the second adult: Big Sam.

Bamforth said both dinosaurs are believed to have been the elders in the herd.

“Their distinguishing feature is that, instead of having a horn on their nose like a triceratops, they had this big, bony bump called a boss. And they have big, bony bumps over their eyes as well,” she said.

“It makes them look a little strange. It’s the one dinosaur that if you find it, it’s the only possible thing it can be.”

The genders of the two adults are unknown.

Bamforth said the extraction was difficult because Big Sam was intertwined in a cluster of about 300 other bones.

The skull was found upside down, “as if the animal was lying on its back,” but was well preserved, she said.

She said the excavation process involved putting plaster on the skull and wooden planks around if for stability. From there, it was lifted out — very carefully — with a crane, and was to be shipped on a trolley to the museum for study.

“I have extracted skulls in the past. This is probably the biggest one I’ve ever done though,” said Bamforth.

“It’s pretty exciting.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 25, 2024.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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The ancient jar smashed by a 4-year-old is back on display at an Israeli museum after repair

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TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — A rare Bronze-Era jar accidentally smashed by a 4-year-old visiting a museum was back on display Wednesday after restoration experts were able to carefully piece the artifact back together.

Last month, a family from northern Israel was visiting the museum when their youngest son tipped over the jar, which smashed into pieces.

Alex Geller, the boy’s father, said his son — the youngest of three — is exceptionally curious, and that the moment he heard the crash, “please let that not be my child” was the first thought that raced through his head.

The jar has been on display at the Hecht Museum in Haifa for 35 years. It was one of the only containers of its size and from that period still complete when it was discovered.

The Bronze Age jar is one of many artifacts exhibited out in the open, part of the Hecht Museum’s vision of letting visitors explore history without glass barriers, said Inbal Rivlin, the director of the museum, which is associated with Haifa University in northern Israel.

It was likely used to hold wine or oil, and dates back to between 2200 and 1500 B.C.

Rivlin and the museum decided to turn the moment, which captured international attention, into a teaching moment, inviting the Geller family back for a special visit and hands-on activity to illustrate the restoration process.

Rivlin added that the incident provided a welcome distraction from the ongoing war in Gaza. “Well, he’s just a kid. So I think that somehow it touches the heart of the people in Israel and around the world,“ said Rivlin.

Roee Shafir, a restoration expert at the museum, said the repairs would be fairly simple, as the pieces were from a single, complete jar. Archaeologists often face the more daunting task of sifting through piles of shards from multiple objects and trying to piece them together.

Experts used 3D technology, hi-resolution videos, and special glue to painstakingly reconstruct the large jar.

Less than two weeks after it broke, the jar went back on display at the museum. The gluing process left small hairline cracks, and a few pieces are missing, but the jar’s impressive size remains.

The only noticeable difference in the exhibit was a new sign reading “please don’t touch.”

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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