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The founder of Lululemon is blasting the athleisure apparel company's push to include diversity, equity, and inclusion in its marketing— specifically by featuring overweight, plus-size women to model their clothes. Billionaire Chip Wilson is taking swings against Lululemon's DEI programs, saying they are destroying the company he created that once featured fit, healthy women in its ads. "I think the definition of a brand is that you're not everything to everybody. You've got to be clear that you don't want certain customers coming in," Wilson said, adding that the brand is trying to "become like the Gap, everything to everybody."...

Nearly 188,000 dementia cases in the U.S. each year may have been caused by air pollution, researchers estimate, with bad air quality from wildfires and agriculture showing the strongest links to a person's risk of Alzheimer's disease and other kinds of dementia later in life. Published Monday in the journal JAMA Network Open, the new estimates are the latest to underscore the range of health risks scientists have long warned are being driven by air pollution. "The environmental community has been working very hard for the past 10 to 15 years to be able to predict exposures," said Sara Adar,...

Earth's average temperature remained at a record high Wednesday after two days in which the planet reached unofficial records. It's the latest marker in a series of climate-change-driven extremes.The average global temperature was 62.9 degrees, according to the University of Maine's Climate Reanalyzer, a tool that uses satellite data and computer simulations to measure the world's condition. That matched a record set Tuesday and came after a previous record of 62.6 degrees was set Monday.

How could this be all white? Organizers of a South Carolina town’s Juneteenth events have issued a groveling apology for advertising the holiday marking the emancipation of black slaves with a banner showing only a white couple. The seemingly colorblind promos for Juneteenth GVL’s June “mega fest” went viral soon after they were put up across Greenville — sparking outrage and even calls for a boycott. “You want to celebrate the depth of black culture on Juneteenth by putting white [people] as the face of it?” one outraged critic tweeted the organizers. “How were you not aware how problematic that...

Tesla is cutting prices again to boost demand in an increasingly crowded electric vehicle (EV) market. The EV maker on Thursday cut prices on all of its models, including a $5,000 price drop for its luxury Model S and Model X vehicles. Tesla also began taking orders on a new, cheaper Model Y that starts at under $50,000. Tesla CEO Elon Musk has said he’s willing to sacrifice profit margins to cement Tesla as the dominant EV manufacturer. Tesla is the best-selling EV company in the U.S. but has gradually ceded market share as major auto companies rush to catch...

The warm Arctic-cold Eurasia (WACE) climate pattern is the main feature of winter temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere in the last 20 years. Extreme cold events related to this pattern have occurred frequently there. The ability of climate models to simulate WACE directly affects the skill in simulating winter temperature. Past studies have shown that previous generations of climate models were poor at simulating midlatitude atmospheric response to sea ice, making them simulate a weaker than observed WACE. Now, scientists from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, China Meteorological Administration and Nanjing University of Information...

Climate models used by the UN's IPCC and others to project climate change are not accurately reflecting what the Arctic's future will be. Researchers at the University of Gothenburg argue that the rate of warming will be much faster than projected. Due to the Arctic´s sea ice cover and its harsh climate, relatively few observations are made in that part of world. This means that the climate models used for projecting the future of the Arctic have not been calibrated to the same extent there as in other parts of the world. Two recent scientific studies involving researchers from the...

Just days after Tesla executives announced plans to improve affordability of their electric cars, Tesla has marked down prices on two of its top end models. Reuters reported that the most recent price cuts are Tesla’s fifth time adjusting pricing since the start of the year, with the price drops ranging from 4 percent on the performance version of the Model S vehicle to 9 percent on the Model X vehicle. Reuters reported that Tesla dropped prices of both versions of the Model S by $5,000. According to Tesla’s website, the basic version of the Model S now costs $89,990...

Tesla lowered prices across the United States, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, following a series of cuts last week in Asia, in what analysts saw as a clear shot at both smaller rivals that have been bleeding cash and legacy automakers aggressively ramping up electric vehicle production...The U.S. price cuts on Tesla's global top-sellers the Model 3 sedan and Model Y crossover SUV were between 6% and 20%, Reuters calculations showed, with the basic Model Y now costing $52,990, down from $65,990.Tesla also cut prices for its Model X luxury crossover SUV and Model S sedan in the United...

After Victoria’s Secret’s stock price plummeted last week and CEO Amy Hauk announced her departure after just eight months at the lingerie brand, conservative critics were quick to diagnose the company’s failures as a classic case of “go woke, go broke.” It’s an easy, albeit lazy, argument to make considering the brand’s recent shift to “inclusive” models and the cancellation of their iconic “Angels” fashion show, but it ignores broader challenges across the retail industry, especially issues faced by brands with a long-held association with the now nearly extinct shopping malls.Victoria’s Secret introduced its more “inclusive” rebrand campaign in 2021,...

Seventy-some researcher groups were given identical data, and asked to investigate an identical question. The groups did not communicate. Details are in the paper “Observing Many Researchers Using the Same Data and Hypothesis Reveals a Hidden Universe of Uncertainty“, by some enormous number of authors. As is the wont of sociologists, each group created several models, about 15 on average. There were 1,253 different models from the seventy groups Each was examined after the fact, and it was discovered no two models were the same.

A new study led by Graham Taylor, a Ph.D. student in Portland State's Earth, Environment, and Society program and Paul Loikith, associate professor of geography at PSU, tested how well climate models represent large-scale weather patterns over the Pacific Northwest. Since all computer models have different strengths and weaknesses based on differences in physics, scientists often use the output from many different climate models to assess projections of future climate change. For this study, the researchers used data from the state-of-the-art sixth phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6) to test how well 26 different climate models could simulate...

As Hurricane Ian bore down on Florida, normally reliable computer forecast models couldn’t agree on where the killer storm would land. But government meteorologists are now figuring out what went wrong — and right. Much of the forecasting variation seems to be rooted in cool Canadian air that had weakened a batch of sunny weather over the East Coast. That weakening would allow Ian to turn eastward to Southwest Florida instead of north and west to the Panhandle hundreds of miles away. The major American computer forecast model -- one of several used by forecasters -- missed that and the...

The owner of a $155,000 Tesla Model S Plaid told the Elon Musk-focused outlet Teslarati that he received a call that any car owner would dread just days after dropping off his vehicle for service in Plano, Texas. The man, identified only as Jeff, said he left his car at the Tesla Service Center in Plano on Aug. 24 and was contacted by the service center on Aug. 30. According to the report, the Tesla employee said four words every car owner dreads: “We have some bad news.” Then he added, “Your car was totaled.” Jeff, understandably, couldn’t believe what...

There is a growing sense that there is a crisis in science, with science being broadly defined to include the soft sciences. The reproducibility crisis, as pointed out by the statistician W. M. Briggs, is close to universal. Across the academy, there is a plague of faulty and fraudulent studies being produced. Worse yet, the systems for controlling fraud seem to be encouraging it. Peer review now means nothing more than politically acceptable in the soft science fields. Briggs offers one reason for what is happening. He notes that engineering is not having this problem. The reason is the bridge...

Joe Biden inadvertently financed his son Hunter’s dalliances with a Russia-linked escort ring, according to a report Monday. President Biden wired his 52-year-old son $100,000 to help him pay bills from December 2018 through January 2019, the Washington Examiner reported, citing records from a laptop Hunter Biden left behind at a computer repair shop in Delaware. Hunter Biden, meanwhile, had spent more than $30,000 on sex workers between November 2018 and March 2019, records show — including many linked to Russia-based email addresses and connected to an “exclusive model agency” called UberGFE, the outlet reported. Joe Biden wired Hunter $5,000...

Federal officials say climate change is intensifying droughts, leading to wildfires far worse than experts or models have predicted. That is adding to the danger that accompanies one of the U.S. Forest Service’s primary methods of mitigation: the prescribed burn. “Fires are outpacing our models,” Forest Service Chief Randy Moore said in a statement this week. Moore pointed to escalating climate conditions as the reason why an otherwise routine prescribed burn in New Mexico earlier this year escaped to ignite the largest wildfire in state history. “Climate change is leading to conditions on the ground we have never encountered,” he...

Computer models that project future climates are widely used for adaptation, mitigation and resilience planning. More than 50 such models were assessed and compared in the latest round of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, phase 6 (CMIP6), run by the World Climate Research Programme1. It is crucial that researchers know the best way to use those outputs to provide consistent information for climate science and policy. We are climate modellers and analysts who develop, distribute and use these projections. We know scientists must treat them with great care. Users beware: a subset of the newest generation of models are ‘too...

Two women who were dumped unconscious at different Los Angeles hospitals late last year by masked men died of multiple drug intoxication, the Los Angeles coroner has ruled. Christy Giles, a 24-year-old model, and her friend Hilda Marcela Cabrales Arzola, 26, were dropped off at the hospitals on Nov. 13 by the men in a black Toyota without license plates, Los Angeles police said at the time. Giles, 24, died the same days she was dropped at the hospital of multiple drug intoxication, with cocaine, fentanyl, gamma-hydroxybutyric acid (GHB) — a date rape drug — and ketamine in her system,...

Paris (AFP) – People driven from their homes as global warming redraws the map of habitable zones are unlikely to find refuge in countries more focused on slamming shut their borders than planning for a climate-addled future, according to a top expert on migration. From fleeing a typhoon to relocating in anticipation of sea level rise, climate migration covers a myriad of situations and raises a host of questions. But one thing is sure: the number of climate refugees is going to increase in the coming decades, according to a major UN report on climate impacts and vulnerability released on...