レアジョブ英会話 Daily News Article Podcast

Commuters, residents, and tourists who take to social media during warm months to complain about sweltering subway systems in New York, Boston, and London should feel vindicated—new research says they aren't alone.

As temperatures rise aboveground, the number of subway riders reporting uncomfortable heat belowground increases, according to a new study in the journal Nature Cities. This could worsen as climate change, driven by the burning of fossil fuels, makes for a hotter planet.

Northwestern University researchers analyzed more than 85,000 crowdsourced social posts on the social platform X and Google Maps reviews from 2008 to 2024 in those three major cities’ subway systems. They searched for keywords related to being too hot—or what they called “thermal discomfort”—in those metropolises, which are some of the world’s oldest and busiest. The experts looked for terms such as “hot” and “warm” while filtering out results that did not seem to relate to temperature, such as “hot dog.”

The study’s authors said subway riders may expect temperatures to be naturally cooler underground. They found that a 1°F (0.5°C) increase in outdoor temperature led to a 10% increase in complaints in Boston, 12% in New York, and 27% in London. Earth’s average temperature warmed 1°F (0.56°C) from 2008 to 2024, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The researchers analyzed posts across seasons, time of day, and day of week.

“Interestingly, over the weekend, people complained less,” said Giorgia Chinazzo, assistant professor in Northwestern’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, who co-authored the study with associate professor Alessandro Rotta Loria. Chinazzo speculated that one reason may be that people were dressing differently than on workdays.

Flavio Lehner, an assistant professor of Earth and atmospheric sciences at Cornell University who was not involved in the work, said the research “follows the template of previous studies that link environmental conditions to human behavior using social media data.” He has also studied how warm conditions trigger a stronger online reaction.

Lehner said limitations of the research include only monitoring three city transit systems and it being difficult to control for other factors influencing social media behavior.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

Alligators were once in peril of being hunted to extinction, and formally listed on the Endangered Species List decades ago. Their numbers weren't too depleted to rebound in the wild if their habitat was maintained, say some experts.

But around the time they were pronounced endangered, scientists with the state of Louisiana proposed a different way to boost their numbers while protecting their habitat: farmers would pay landowners a hefty price for eggs collected from nests on their properties, raise them to sell their meat locally and their skins on the luxury market, and then release a certain percentage back into the wild every year.

Now, the state of Louisiana produces over 400,000 farmed alligators every year, with farmers bringing in an estimated value of $86 million, per the state's wildlife fisheries department. Based on data from aerial nest surveys and wild hunting tags, the state allots every year, they decide how many to release back into the wild.

As numbers in the wild have grown, they've gradually dropped the percentage returned each year, from close to 20% in the early 2000s to about 5% now.

Farmers and state officials say the trackers help international authorities trace and enforce that every product comes from a legal operation.

Kevin Sagrera, who operates Vermillion Gator Farm in Abbeville, Louisiana, also says the financial incentives for landowners to protect alligators’ habitat and, by extension, the alligator’s eggs, help boost an ecosystem that can provide these coastal areas protection from stormwaters.

Advocates say gator farming has turned the demand for boots and bags into a reason to care for a species often seen as scary, bothersome, or solely useful for their leathery outsides. Not all conservationists agree with the practice and express concerns over tying conservation to capitalism.

But for luxury brands launching sustainability goals to consumers who increasingly care about brands' environmental impacts, gator ranching tells a story they say adds to and justifies the value of expensive goods.

Some of the scientists who study them see that as reality. These wetlands, these alligators ... it has to have some kind of monetary value, said George Melancon, alligator research biologist for the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries. Otherwise, people just forget about them.”

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

Google Maps will depend more heavily on artificial intelligence to help people figure out where they want to go and the best way to get there as part of a major redesign.

The overhaul driven by Google's Gemini technology will introduce two AI features into a digital mapping service used by more than 2 billion people worldwide.

One tool called Ask Maps will expand upon conversational abilities that Google brought to the service last November, giving suggestions to users looking for things such as nearby places to charge their devices, cafes with short lines, or a detailed itinerary for a road trip involving several stops and excursions.

Gemini's recommendations will draw upon a database spanning more than 300 million places and reviews from more than 500 million contributors that have been accumulated since Google Maps' debut more than 20 years ago.

Google executives declined to answer a question about whether the company eventually plans to sell ads to boost businesses' chances of being displayed in Ask Maps' recommendations. Ask Maps initially will be available on Google Maps' mobile app for iPhones and Android software in the U.S. and India, before expanding to personal computers and other countries.

In what Google executives are billing as the biggest change to the maps' driving directions, Gemini has also created a new tool dubbed Immersive Navigation that will present a three-dimensional perspective designed to give users a better grasp of where they are at any moment in time.

The 3D renderings created by Gemini will include landmarks such as notable buildings, medians in the roads, and other aspects of the terrain that drivers are seeing around them as they drive to help them get their bearings more quickly.

Google believes its AI guardrails are now strong enough to prevent the Gemini technology underlying Immersive Navigation from fabricating bogus places to go, a malfunction known within the industry as a “hallucination.”

Immersive Navigation is also supposed to help Google Maps more clearly explain the pros and cons of different driving routes to the same recommendation, as well as point to the best places to park once a user arrives at a designated destination.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

Most of America “sprang forward” for daylight saving time on March 8. Losing that hour of sleep can do more than leave you tired and cranky the next day. It could also harm your health.

Darker mornings and more evening light knock your body clock out of whack, which means daylight saving time can usher in sleep trouble for weeks or longer. Studies have even found an uptick in heart attacks and strokes right after the March time change.

There are ways to ease the adjustment, including getting more sunshine to help reset your circadian rhythm for healthful sleep.

Daylight saving time began on March 8 at 2 a.m., an hour of sleep vanishing in most of the U.S. The ritual will reverse on Nov. 1 when clocks “fall back” as daylight saving time ends.

Hawaii and most of Arizona don’t make the spring switch, sticking to standard time year-round—along with Puerto Rico, American Samoa, Guam, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Worldwide, dozens of countries also observe daylight saving time, starting and ending at different dates.

Some people try to prepare for daylight saving time by going to bed a little earlier two or three nights ahead. While getting back on schedule after an hour's change may not be that difficult for some people, it's an added challenge for the third of U.S. adults who already don't get the recommended seven hours of nightly shuteye.

The brain has a master clock that is set by exposure to sunlight and darkness. This circadian rhythm is a roughly 24-hour cycle that determines when we become sleepy and when we’re more alert. The patterns change with age, one reason that early-to-rise youngsters evolve into hard-to-wake teens.

Morning light resets the rhythm. By evening, levels of a hormone called melatonin begin to surge, triggering drowsiness. Too much light in the evening—that extra hour from daylight saving time—delays that surge, and the cycle gets out of sync.

Sleep deprivation is linked to heart disease, cognitive decline, obesity, and numerous other problems. And that circadian clock affects more than sleep, also influencing things like heart rate, blood pressure, stress hormones, and metabolism.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

Climate change's rising seas may threaten tens of millions more people than scientists and government planners originally thought because of mistaken research assumptions on how high coastal waters already are, a new study said.

Researchers studied hundreds of scientific studies and hazard assessments, calculating that about 90% of them underestimated baseline coastal water heights by an average of 1 foot (30 centimeters), according to the study in the journal Nature. It's a far more frequent problem in the Global South, the Pacific, and Southeast Asia, and less so in Europe and along Atlantic coasts.

The cause is a mismatch between the way sea and land altitudes are measured, said study co-author Philip Minderhoud, a hydrogeology professor at Wageningen University Research in the Netherlands. And he attributed that to a “methodological blind spot” between the different ways those two things are measured.

Each way measures its own areas properly, he said. But where sea meets land, there are a lot of factors that often don't get accounted for when satellites and land-based models are used. Studies that calculate sea level rise impact usually “do not look at the actual measured sea level, so they used this zero-meter” figure as a starting point, said lead author Katharina Seeger of the University of Padua in Italy. In some places in the Indo-Pacific, it's close to 3 feet (1 meter), Minderhoud said.

One simple way to understand that is that many studies assume sea levels without waves or currents, when the reality at the water's edge is of oceans constantly roiled by wind, tides, currents, changing temperatures, and things like El Niño, said Minderhoud and Seeger.

Adjusting to a more accurate coastal height baseline means that if seas rise by a little more than 3 feet (1 meter)—as some studies suggest will happen by the end of the century—waters could inundate up to 37% more land and threaten 77 million to 132 million more people, the study said.

That would trigger problems in planning and paying for the impacts of a warming world.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

The North Dakota Highway Patrol's newest recruit has floppy ears, four legs, and an amazing knack for finding people. Beau, a 12-week-old puppy, is joining a band of bloodhounds who are in demand for difficult cases across the upper Midwest.

They trail missing children, people with dementia, and criminal suspects. The agency uses drones and aircraft to aid searches, but bloodhounds remain an age-old, low-tech solution. “These dogs are just specifically bred to search for people,” said Trooper Steven Mayer, who handles Bleu, one of the dogs.

Bloodhounds have about 300 million scent receptors in their nose, vastly more than humans and more than other dogs, Mayer said.

Their big, floppy ears and folds of skin help gather odor for the dog to trail people, sometimes after a week or more, he said. The dogs have scented from a wall someone touched, the dirt a person stumbled in, and vomit on a car door.

Highway Patrol began using bloodhounds about 14 years ago, moving away from dual-purpose dogs to singular-purpose drug dogs and trailing dogs. The state force receives about 70 calls a year for their services, including one to Montana last year to help find a man suspected in the killing of four people at an Anaconda bar.

Beau was born in Texas but has since moved to North Dakota's largest city, Fargo. His early training is mostly potty and kennel training and basic commands, as well as socializing him to different places, people, and environments, said Trooper Dustin Pattengale, Beau's handler. He won't be ready for a full or certified trail until he is about 9 months old.

North Dakota's dogs are something of a social media sensation for the Highway Patrol. Beau's name was picked in a Facebook vote. Recent videos depict him chewing a toy bear and another bloodhound, Lorace, gallivanting in new boots.

“Everybody loves a dog, I mean, especially these little babies, these floppy-eared ones,” said Mayer, who hopes the dogs' visibility yields earlier calls for their assistance.

“The more word we can get out about the program and the faster we get calls on it, the easier we can get out and be available to help people,” he said.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

Online influencers claim the secret to low-calorie rice, pasta, and potatoes may be as simple as chilling out. Are they right? Not quite. But a small yet solid body of science does suggest that chilling these carbohydrate-rich foods after cooking them still could help people slim down.

Most of the carbohydrates in these foods come from starch, of which there are two types: hard-to-digest amylose and easily digested amylopectin.

Most raw carbohydrates, like uncooked potatoes, are made mostly of the hard-to-digest starch or resistant starch, but cooking converts it into the easily digested one. This is why diabetics need to be mindful when eating starchy foods.

But many influencers believe that chilling those cooked foods triggers “retrogradation,” a process that converts easily digested starch back into resistant starch, making it harder to digest even if the food is then reheated.

What does that mean for calories and blood sugar?

Multiple studies since 2015 have found that people who ate rice that was cooked and then cooled had sometimes significantly lower blood sugar levels after eating compared to people who ate freshly cooked rice. Those findings are generally well-accepted.

Less studied is whether retrogradation also reduces the calories available from these foods.

Dr. David Ludwig, an endocrinologist and researcher at Boston Children’s Hospital, said, “It doesn’t appreciably change the calorie content of that food, (but) it may well affect your hormones and metabolism in a way that makes controlling calories a lot easier.”

Eating foods high in resistant starch reduces the surge in blood sugar typically seen after consuming cooked carbohydrates, he explained. And that’s key not only for diabetics.

Studies have shown that those sugar spikes activate the brain’s reward mechanism and trigger cravings, making overeating at snacks and later meals more likely.

Also, those blood sugar surges increase the body’s production of insulin, which not only makes us feel hungry but prompts the body’s metabolism to store more calories as fat, Ludwig said.

“When the food retrogrades, it digests more slowly,” he said. “It’s going to keep your blood sugar more stable. You’ll have less insulin to drive fat storage and likely have an easier time avoiding overeating.”

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

During winter in Minnesota, people lined up in single-digit cold at the Moorhead Dairy Queen (DQ) as if spring were in the air.

The annual March 1 opening of the 77-year-old walk-up ice cream shop is a tradition, no matter the weather. Heavy snow, subzero cold—people will brave a blizzard for a Blizzard.

“It just says that we're tough, and there are things that are really important to us,” said Jerry Protextor, a retired pastor who stood in line for a butterscotch milkshake and a chocolate-mint Blizzard. “It's just a part of community.”

March is very much a winter month in the Upper Midwest, though the weather can vary wildly. The annual opening of the Dairy Queen “heritage store” brings the hope of spring and a familiar promise for people who need something to look forward to, especially with unrest in the world, owners Troy and Diane DeLeon said.

“It’s a sense of unity. It’s a tradition for many families,” Diane DeLeon said.

Wintry weather typically has a long hold on the region, and that was certainly true last March 1, as the temperature was a brisk 6 °F (-14 °C) when the Dairy Queen opened. Patrons could gaze over snowy surroundings as they ate their icy treats.

An average of 1,200 customers stopped by the Dairy Queen on its opening day. Some showed up early and waited in their cars. Being first in line brings yearlong bragging rights. The store typically closes in late October.

Julie Bergseid arrived before 7 a.m. to be first in line after two years in a row as second.

“Usually there's a little bit of a line after a bit, so you gotta get here before they start,” she said. “It's momentous that this is the start of spring, no matter what the temperature. This starts it: going to the DQ, getting your first ice cream of the season.”

Bundled up in snow pants, long underwear, wool socks, and mittens, she planned to sit down at a patio table and enjoy her barbecue, a Peanut Buster Parfait, and a Dilly frozen treat.

“It won't melt. That's the nice thing,” Bergseid said.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

Imagine dining on “edible plastic” made from algae and collagen from fish skins. While you ingest the dish, ocean-borne plastic pollution seemingly floats above you, projected across the restaurant's huge domed ceiling. It's an experience—and dish—inspired by large garbage patches found in our seas.

In Denmark, Chef Rasmus Munk doesn't offer dishes at the Alchemist restaurant. Instead, he whisks guests on an “immersive dining experience” combining performance, music, projections in its planetarium-like domed dining room, and, of course, food.

Opened in 2019 at the site of a former industrial harbor area in the Danish capital, Copenhagen, Alchemist was named the world's fifth-best restaurant in 2025. It has two Michelin stars, signifying excellence in cuisine, out of a maximum of three possible for one establishment.

Guests at this restaurant can experience 50 “impressions,” most of them edible. Dining there means trying various foods—a large eyeball dish featuring caviar and codfish eye gel, and nettle butterflies served atop cheese and artichoke leaves—over many hours, in a slow process that invites reflection on the food and surrounding projections.

“We convey messages through our food. Our food is our medium of expressing ourselves,” said Munk, whose dishes also explore issues such as state surveillance and animal welfare.

Culture Minister Jakob Engel-Schmidt said in January that Denmark would explore whether gastronomy could be formally recognized as an art form. If realized, it could become the first nation to legally place cooking—or at least the highest versions of it—on a similar pedestal to painting.

Other nations with famed food cultures, including France and Japan, haven't made similar moves. Last year, UNESCO granted Italian cooking cultural heritage status.

Denmark has previously expanded what constitutes art and culture, for example, by awarding a lifetime national arts honor to heavy metal act King Diamond. Last year, the Sonning Prize, Denmark's largest cultural award, was awarded to French gastronomic artist and chemist Hervé This.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

Global energy trade is in turmoil as war around the Persian Gulf chokes off oil and natural gas shipments, causing prices to soar.

Asia is the most exposed since it relies heavily on imported fuel, much of it shipped through the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow passageway that carries a fifth of global trade in crude oil and liquified natural gas (LNG).

About 13 million barrels of oil per day moved through the corridor in 2025, according to energy consultancy Kpler. That's about a third of all seaborne crude, the unrefined petroleum that is processed into fuels such as gasoline and diesel.

Few regions are as exposed to Middle East energy flow disruptions as East Asia. “If the Strait of Hormuz closure is prolonged, then we do expect oil and gas prices to increase across Asia. But this again would depend on the severity of the blockage and, importantly, how long the blockage lasts. We've already seen this price spike happen,” said Amy Kong, energy transition researcher at Zero Carbon Analytics.

Japan imported 2.34 million barrels of crude per day in January, about 95% of its total imports that month, according to its Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry. Japan is often ranked as the world's second-largest LNG importer.

South Korea relies nearly entirely on energy imports. The Korea International Trade Association says it gets around 70% of its crude oil and 20% of its LNG from the Middle East.

Taiwan also imports nearly all of its LNG. It has been trying to reduce its reliance on the Middle East but still sources about one-third from Qatar, which halted LNG production after attacks on its facilities.

In Manila, authorities banned non-essential travel and personal use of government cars to cut fuel use.

Japan and South Korea have large energy supply stockpiles. While Taiwan announced that it has enough supplies for March and contingency plans for the future.

But analysts say reserves are temporary buffers and energy-intensive industries, like Taiwan's semiconductor industry, remain vulnerable.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.