Two flight attendants for Delta Air Lines were pulled from an international flight after failing a breathalyzer test in Amsterdam on Friday.
Randomly tested by Dutch authorities before a flight to New York’s JFK International Airport, a female flight attendant reportedly showed a blood alcohol level seven times over the legal limit for crew members and a male flight attendant failed by 0.02, an official familiar with the situation confirmed.
The female Delta employee was fined 1,900 euros, or about $2,000, and her male colleague was fined €275, or about $290. Another flight attendant from a different airline was also fined €1,800 (around $1,900) for being 6.5 times over the limit with the trio flagged during a three-hour period in which police screened 445 pilots and flight attendants at Schiphol Airport, according to Aviation A2Z.
A spokesperson for the Atlanta-based carrier told CBS News that the incident did not affect the flight.
“Delta’s alcohol policy is among the strictest in the industry and we have zero tolerance for violation. The employees were removed from their scheduled duties and the flight departed as scheduled,” the spokesperson said.
Dutch police said in a statement that a third flight attendant with another, unspecified foreign airline also tested well over the legal limit for commercial flight crews on the same day at Schiphol and was fined about $1,900.
European aviation regulations restrict alcohol consumption for aircrew, and the Netherlands specifically bans pilots and crew members from drinking within 10 hours of a flight. The European Air Safety Agency warns that merely adhering to the “bottle to throttle” time rule does not guarantee compliance with legal blood alcohol concentration limits.
In the U.S., the Federal Aviation Administration recommends eight hours between drinking and flying and that employees be removed from their duties if their blood alcohol concentration registers 0.02 or above on a required test.
Assistant Professor Amit Joshi shares research findings in his University of Tennessee lab. Credit: University of Tennessee
Channels in plant cell walls, called plasmodesmata, provide molecules with a bridge to move between cells, an essential phenomenon for cellular growth and development. The mystery has long been how these important channels form.
Assistant Professor Amit Joshi joined an international group of colleagues to publish new research findings on the formation of an important mechanism in cellular growth and development in plants in the journal Science.
Joshi, a member of the Department of Biochemistry and Cellular and Molecular Biology since 2021, previously discovered two proteins that help form tube-like endoplasmic membrane in mammalian cells.
“We showed that these proteins are similar to the highly abundant reticulon proteins, which are known to tubulate endoplasmic reticulum membrane,” said Joshi. “We published these findings in Nature Communications in 2018.”
After reading the earlier paper, Professor Emmanuelle Bayer, of the Université de Bordeaux, Villenave d’Ornon, France, invited Joshi to collaborate in a study to determine if plant versions of these proteins do the same thing.
“To test this, we inserted plant MCTPs (proteins) into yeast cells,” said Joshi. “We discovered that plant proteins also tubulated endoplasmic reticulum membrane. Moreover, we found that these plant proteins are concentrated at plasmodesmata.”
The team’s research revealed that plasmodesmata bridges form through an incomplete process of cell division. Through a mix of genetic study, high-resolution microscopy, and modeling, they discovered that continuous connections within the endoplasmic reticulum prevent certain cellular events from occurring fully. As a result, certain cellular areas do not close completely during cell division, forming the pathways of plasmodesmata and enhancing communication between plants’ cells.
“Cell division, or cytokinesis, in plant and animal cells is different,” said Joshi. “Plant cells form a cell plate to divide the two cells due to the rigid cell wall. Plants are known to form plasmodesmata communication bridges between the daughter cells.”
Until this new study pinpointed it, the mechanism that stabilizes these bridges has been the unknown factor.
“During cell plate formation, we show that the endoplasmic reticulum membrane connects the daughter cells across fenestrae (small openings) and the plasma membrane molds around these tubules to form plasmodesmata,” said Joshi. “We show that plant proteins MCTP3, 4, and 6 stabilize the nascent plasmodesmata.”
Joshi and colleagues can now use these new findings to explore plant cell growth.
“This work will help us understand intercellular communication and signaling,” he said. “We are currently deciphering the role of these proteins in mammalian cells at multiple membrane contact sites.”
More information:
Ziqiang P. Li et al, Plant plasmodesmata bridges form through ER-dependent incomplete cytokinesis, Science (2024). DOI: 10.1126/science.adn4630
Citation:
Plasmodesmata study uncovers plant cell growth mechanism (2024, December 2)
retrieved 3 December 2024
from https://phys.org/news/2024-12-plasmodesmata-uncovers-cell-growth-mechanism.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.
Mars Tapes in Manchester is the last shop in the UK that just sells music on cassette tapes in the UK, according to co-owner Alex Tadross.
Business is booming: “When the Oasis tour was announced we sold out of pretty much anything Oasis. Everything flew out,” he says.
Also popular are cassettes of 80s music, in particular Kate Bush, which Mr Tadross says is probably because her music featured in the hit Netflix show Stranger Things.
“We get a mix of customers,” he says. “A lot of them are customers in their 20s, and teenagers, getting into it for first time, then a few people who had cassettes in their 40s and 50s and buy them for the nostalgic aspect.
“But the majority are under 30. We have a lot of teenagers coming with their parents.”
The shop’s own branded cassette players are also popular.
I’ve had people come in to buy their first cassette players,” says Mr Tadross.
Getty Images
Vintage audio equipment can add to the experience of music
The brisk business at Mars Tapes is part of a wider trend of people buying and fixing old music equipment.
Between 2020 and 2024, Google searches for “CD player repair near me” increased by 23%, while “Audio equipment repair near me” grew by 91%, according to trend data sourced by software firm SEMRush.
A report from Statista forecasts that the global electronics repair service market is expected to double in size from $122bn (£96bn) in 2021 to $240bn (£190bn) in 2033.
So why are some music lovers looking for alternatives to digital music services?
Perhaps modern Bluetooth speakers, earbuds and headphones lack the character of older equipment.
“The market is saturated with devices that offer low price and convenience, but provide an impersonal, sterile experience,” says Sarah Dodge, strategic design manager at the Ellen MacArthur Foundation.
“When you repair an item, you feel more attachment to it, so people may be drawn to a more empowering and rewarding ownership experience.”
For Mark Maher, fixing electrical equipment was a hobby, but soaring demand saw him quit his job as a manager for a multinational power transmission equipment business in September to focus on it full time.
In fact, demand “got so out of hand” Mr Maher has closed the contact section of his website.
“There’s absolutely a growing trend in repairing vintage audio equipment,” says Mr Maher from his business Perton Electronics in the West Midlands.
“People are wanting to restore all sorts, like Sony Walkmans, radio tape decks, and portable CD players they had and loved as teenagers. There’s a lot of nostalgia there.”
He says people are restoring old audio gear they’ve bought on platforms such as Ebay. “Things were certainly built better back then, and are much more repairable than the latest equipment.”
He thinks he’s also in demand as “there’s a genuine shortage of people that can repair things,” he says.
Mr Maher also runs a YouTube channel, Mend it Mark, which has almost 100,000 subscribers.
Mark Maher
Mark Maher left his day job to fix electrical equipment full-time
Refurbished tech marketplace Back Market says that its audio equipment category jumped an average of 123% year on year since its launch on the platform in 2016.
It says record players are its top selling products among the retro audio tech.
Over at the Fixing Factory, a repair centre in Camden, London, Dermot Jones, manager of innovation and development, says that audio equipment makes up a high proportion of the repairs the organisation sees through its doors.
“We get a bit of everything,” says Mr Jones. “Old cassettes, CD players, headphones, speakers, plus turntables. What’s good about the old gear is they kind of last [longer], and you can find out the specification, and there’s service manuals available for many up until the 80s.
With some of the audio equipment, you can even open the case and inside there’s a diagram [of how it looks inside], even with arrows pointing at the screw; they’re nicely designed.”
He says these days electrical equipment looks like it is “designed to break”.
Mr Jones adds: “It’s hardly ever designed to be opened up and fixed; it’s designed and assembled quickly like no one has considered it breaking. Manufacturers have held that knowledge rather than sharing it. Our repairers would have an easier time fixing stuff [if they did].”
Ms Dodge says the move to repair supports the shift to a circular economy, a system where materials never become waste and nature is regenerated.
“One of the principles of the circular economy is to keep products in use, at their highest utility and value, for as long as possible. The thinking is that if you take a product like a CD player and send it to landfill, it becomes waste.
“Even if you recycle it, and return it to its material level, you’re stripping away all the energy that went into turning those materials into a CD player in the first place. ”
Mark Hammond
Ellen Hammond with her restored 1960s record player
Bringing to life old music equipment can bring back special memories.
In the run up to Christmas last year, Mark Hammond was inspired to organise a memorable gift for his wife of over 50 years.
Gathering dust in the loft was a record player his wife, Ellen, received from her parents as a present in 1960, when she was just 10-years=old. The problem was it was broken.
“I was never going to throw it away,” says Mr Hammond, who lives in Seisdon, near Wolverhampton. “There was too much history [associated with it].”
He found Mr Maher who fixed it just in time for Christmas.
On Christmas Day, Mr Hammond asked Ellen to go into the utility room where she found the record player playing one of their favourite records, A Hard Day’s Night by The Beatles.
Ellen’s reaction was worth it, he told me.
“There were tears,” says Ellen. “It was really emotional. Some of my cousins visited and said, ‘Oh my god, we remember coming to your house and seeing that record player’.”
The lower East Rift Zone during Kīlauea Volcano’s 2018 eruption. Credit: USGS, Matt Patrick
Researchers from the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa Department of Earth Sciences assessed an unprecedented 120 years of data from Kīlauea Volcano on Hawai’i Island, uncovering, for the first time, century-spanning patterns of deformation and stress changes. They had a particular focus on the transformative 1975 magnitude 7.7 Kalapana earthquake, which also resulted in a 20-foot high tsunami. Their study was published recently in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth.
“Deciphering Kīlauea’s history deepens our understanding of volcanic and seismic hazards,” said lead author Lauren Ward Yong, who conducted this study as part of her doctoral dissertation in the UH Mānoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST). “It offers critical insights into how stress evolves in volcanic systems, guiding our ability to anticipate and interpret future earthquakes and magmatic events.”
The study highlights the hazard potential of the décollement, the major fault zone beneath Kīlauea volcano where two rock masses are moving past each other, which continuously drives the volcano southward and poses risks of large earthquakes coupled with complex volcanic activity within the region.
Yong and co-authors explored both the deformation and stress changes of the volcano from 1898–2018 by analyzing six different geodetic datasets. Their analysis encompassed 338,396 earthquake observations and more than 15,000 measurements of surface motion, or displacements, to construct a computational model replicating the observed displacements and stress before, during, and after the large 1975 Kalapana earthquake. This model pinpointed key structural features—fault planes, rift zones, and magma chambers—that drove these changes.
Regional map of the southeast portion of the Big Island of Hawai’i with elevation and bathymetry contours and surface fault traces (top panel). Cross‐section of the A‐A′ profile shown on top and approximate projected locations of key geologic features (bottom panel). Credit: Yong, et al. (2024)
Altering stress and motion
They discovered that the 1975 Kalapana earthquake significantly altered the region’s state of stress and deformation. Prior to 1975, in the location where the large earthquake originated, there was no evidence of slip, a movement where two rock masses move past each other.
“This finding suggests that the region was likely frictionally locked and slowly accumulating stress over time leading up to the rupture,” said Yong. “Furthermore, we observed that Kīlauea’s south flank, a geologically active region stretching from the volcano’s summit toward the coastline, experienced greater and more complex displacement prior to the Kalapana earthquake than after.”
Yong and co-authors’ analysis of Kīlauea’s décollement, found the average slip was reduced from 10 centimeters per year before the 1975 earthquake, to just four centimeters per year afterward. These variations in slip and stress distributions along the décollement point to changes in mechanical properties, such as friction, that influence the region’s seismic and magmatic activity over time.
Kilauea’s East Rift Zone erupting. Credit: USGS, N. Deligne
Enhancing hazard preparedness
“Hawai’i’s communities live alongside active volcanoes and face significant seismic risks,” said Yong. “This research enhances hazard preparedness and reinforces UH’s commitment to advancing science for the safety and well-being of Hawai’i’s residents and ecosystems by shedding light on past significant events.”
Kīlauea’s history offers invaluable insights into the complex relationships between magmatic processes and earthquake cycles. Building on this foundation, Yong and her team plan to refine their models by delving deeper into key properties of Kīlauea’s structural features, such as friction along fault planes, to improve understanding of how stress changes trigger seismic and magmatic activity.
More information:
Lauren Ward Yong et al, A Century of Deformation and Stress Change on Kīlauea’s Décollement, Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth (2024). DOI: 10.1029/2024JB028714
Citation:
Unveiling a century of stress and deformation: Insights from Kīlauea Volcano’s 1975 earthquake (2024, December 2)
retrieved 3 December 2024
from https://phys.org/news/2024-12-unveiling-century-stress-deformation-insights.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.
A World War Two veteran has said Sir Keir Starmer has a “golden opportunity” to end what she describes as a “brutal” policy of freezing the pensions of some Britons who move overseas.
Anne Puckridge, who is days away from turning 100, is one of just over 453,000 British pensioners living abroad who do not get any annual rise in their state pension.
She has received £72.50 a week since she moved to Canada in 2001, at the age of 76, to be nearer her daughter.
Her state pension is now less than half the £169.50 paid to pensioners still living in the UK.
Ms Puckridge has lobbied successive governments without success and has now travelled to Westminster to raise the issue with the new government.
She will meet Pensions Minister Emma Reynolds later, after her request to meet Sir Keir was turned down due to “pressures on his diary”.
Previous governments have rejected calls to uprate frozen pensions, citing the cost as a barrier.
Ms Puckridge told the BBC frozen pensions affect every aspect of life.
“You’ve got to be careful about entertainment,” she said.
“You’ve got to remember you can’t be as kind to your grandchildren as you’d like to be.
“You feel you’ve lost all sense of dignity, the government has thrown you away, you know, out of sight out of mind.”
Ms Puckridge said when she informed the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) she was moving to Canada “they never said a word about [my] pension being frozen”.
“The first I knew about it was when my first raise was due,” she said.
“I didn’t get it. So I wrote and asked about it, and I was told no… you will receive no more from the day you left the UK, no more increases in pension.”
She added: “It’s the injustice of it that is so unfair, the fact that we were never warned.”
Anne Puckridge
Ms Puckridge (second from left) enlisted to serve during World War Two at the age of 17
Under an arrangement called the “triple lock”, the UK state pension goes up each year by either 2.5%, inflation or earnings growth – whichever is the highest figure.
Not all pensioners who move abroad have their pensions frozen.
The UK has agreements in place with EU countries and the United States, among others, to continue increasing pensions in line with the amount received by UK residents.
Canada, Australia, New Zealand and India are among the countries which do not have agreements.
Campaigners say that creates an injustice.
Patrick Edwards, who lives in Australia and is also part of the End Frozen Pensions campaign, said they had paid in like everyone else but were now being “treated differently merely because of their address”.
“If they lived in many other countries around the world they’d be getting the same as people in the UK but unfairly they’ve been selected as having had their pensions frozen,” he said.
There is diplomatic pressure to change the policy too.
The Canadian government is understood to have raised the issue with the new government already.
The Australian government made repeated representations to the last government and a spokesperson said it would continue to raise it at “appropriate opportunities”.
Anne Puckridge
Ms Puckridge with her grandchildren Andrew and Kirsty and daughter Gillian
There appears to be little disagreement that politically it is difficult to justify the different treatment of overseas pensioners between countries.
The Institute for Economic Affairs think tank, which has often questioned the sustainability of the state pension, said: “The government should always be trying to save money, but this does not look like a particularly principled way of doing so.”
However, previous governments have argued that individual pensioners would be unlikely to benefit overall, as many also get financial support from governments, like Canada and Australia, which would be reduced as a result.
They have also cited the cost of fully restoring frozen pensions as a barrier.
In 2019, the Conservative government estimated it would cost £600m to fully restore pensions to the level they would have been if they had not been frozen.
The End Frozen Pensions Campaign says it only asking for pensions to increase from their current point.
It estimates the cost would be £55m in 2025/26.
A spokesperson for the DWP said: “We understand people move abroad for many reasons, and we provide clear information on how this can impact their finances in retirement – with the policy on the uprating of the UK state pension for recipients living overseas a longstanding one.”
