Events

Coyotes and red foxes seldom interact in the wild, as foxes tend to give coyotes a wide berth. In urban areas, however, they seem to get along just fine: Over the years, foxes and coyotes, like so many other wild species, have settled in the city, and they’re inevitably here to stay. It’s not uncommon to see them scampering across their neighborhoods. Some animal species have adapted to thrive amid the human-dominated landscape of high rises, fragmented green space, and heavy traffic. Now, at least in...

Eurostar will launch London-to-Amsterdam service on April 4th. Airlines are worried: Currently, a Londoner bound for Amsterdam by train can expect the journey to take a little under five hours, with a change of trains in Brussels. The new service will reach speeds of up to 186 miles per hour and cancel the need to change in Brussels, shaving off over an hour. The prospect has already generated a palpable buzz, and the 900 tickets offered a day (starting at a reasonable $47 one way) are likely to sell...

Over the last two weeks, Chicago tied a record for the most consecutive days with measurable snowfall: Chicago logged a record-tying ninth consecutive day with measurable snowfall on Sunday, equaling similar nine-day runs from Jan. 29-Feb. 6, 1902 and Jan. 6-14, 2009. Measurable snow has now been logged daily from February 3-11. No snow is expected Monday, so the record should not be broken. The past nine days have also completely obliterated the 2017-18 seasonal snow deficit. Through midnight Saturday...

That was my step total yesterday: 9,971. All I had to do was look at my Fitbit before midnight and take 30 steps right then. So frustrating. My numbers have been off all year, mainly owing to the bitter cold early on and the buckets of snow in the past week. We've gotten some precipitation every day of the past 8 (and on Monday bitter cold as well), so that this morning there was 300 mm on the ground at O'Hare. Still, if I got 99.7% of the way to my daily step goal, I could have taken 30 more steps...

Andrew Sullivan cautions the American left against turning into the very thing it hates about the far-right: The idea of individual merit — as opposed to various forms of unearned “privilege” — is increasingly suspect. The Enlightenment principles that formed the bedrock of the American experiment — untrammeled free speech, due process, individual (rather than group) rights — are now routinely understood as mere masks for “white male” power, code words for the oppression of women and nonwhites. Any...

North suburban New Trier High School—one of the richest public schools in the world—has a world-record 44 sets of twins (and one set of triplets) in the 10th grade class alone. I'm going to ask Deeply Trivial to help figure out, what is the probability this happened entirely by chance? Kathy Routliffe has the story for Pioneer Press: Their numbers are noteworthy, given that the class has slightly more than 1,000 students, according to New Trier officials. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention...

The Federal court in the Northern District of California ruled today that GrubHub delivery drivers are contractors, not employees: The ruling may have far-reaching implications for other sharing economy companies, including Uber Technologies Inc., whose business models are built on pairing customers with products and services through apps and typically avoid the costs of traditional employment. U.S. Magistrate Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley in San Francisco concluded Thursday, in a first-of-its-kind...

While we hope it will not repeat early February 2011, we expect to get up to 300 mm of snow overnight and into tomorrow here in Chicago: The Chicago area is under a winter storm warning from Thursday evening through Friday night, with the National Weather Service warning that "travel will be very difficult to impossible at times, including during the morning commute." Much of the area should see 6 to 10 inches of snow between 6 p.m. Thursday and 9 p.m. Friday, though some areas to the north of the city...

Via Bruce Schneier (and other sources), the Australian government suffered one of its worst-ever disclosures of secrets caused by not looking through used furniture: It begins at a second-hand shop in Canberra, where ex-government furniture is sold off cheaply. The deals can be even cheaper when the items in question are two heavy filing cabinets to which no-one can find the keys. They were purchased for small change and sat unopened for some months until the locks were attacked with a drill. Inside was...

I got a weird text from T-Mobile a few minutes ago: T-Mobile Alert: We have identified an industry-wide phone number port out scam and encourage you to add account security. Learn more: t-mo.co/secure Well, that does not sound good. And it's not. Apparently thieves have found that American mobile phone providers are unusually helpful when it comes time to steal mobile phone numbers (called "SIM hijacking") or to port those numbers to third-party mobile providers. In both cases, the thieves now have a...