Rural

When it comes to your health, place matters. If you live in a rural county, the bottom-line truth is that you’re less apt to be healthy than if you lived in a more urban one. A couple of recent reports shed some light on both the issues and potential solutions.  According to the 2018 County Health Rankings, published by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in partnership with the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute, rural counties continue [node:read-more:link]

A new report finds that high-tide flooding is happening across the United States at twice the rate it was just 30 years ago and predicts records for such flooding will continue to be broken for decades as sea levels rise. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Wednesday that high-tide flooding, sometimes called sunny-day or "nuisance flooding," tied or set records last year in more than a quarter of the 98 places the agency monitors around the country. The report found Sabine Pass, Texas, had 23 days of high-tide flooding last year. [node:read-more:link]

Amid widening gaps in politics and demographics, Americans in urban, suburban and rural areas share many aspects of community life. Large demographic shifts are reshaping America. The country is growing in numbers, it’s becoming more racially and ethnically diverse and the population is aging. But according to a new analysis by Pew Research Center, these trends are playing out differently across community types. [node:read-more:link]

By many standards, Wisconsin’s overall economic condition has never been better. Its core unemployment rate is the nation’s eighth-lowest; it ranks fifth among the states in the percentage of adults who are part of the labor force; it ranks 11th in the per capita growth of its gross domestic product since 2010; and it ranks 19th among the states in the percentage growth of total business establishments in this decade. Those are statewide snapshots from a mix of sources, but there is really no such thing as a “statewide” economy. [node:read-more:link]

Ocean litter, recycling and more environmentally sustainable uses of plastics in general get significant attention in the Ocean Plastics Charter adopted June 9 by five of the G7 member nations. [node:read-more:link]

Human encouragement might influence how dogs solve problems, according to a new Oregon State University study. [node:read-more:link]

An international team of academics undertook a large-scale review of research into turn-taking behavior in animal communication, analyzing hundreds of animal studies. [node:read-more:link]

If you lie with dogs, you might get fleas—or worse, an influenza virus that is completely unfamiliar to your immune defenses. The risk appears to be rising, says an international team of scientists that has been studying how influenza viruses jump from species to species. In a new study, these scientists present evidence that influenza virus can jump from pigs into canines, and that influenza is becoming increasingly diverse in canines. [node:read-more:link]

Beau Gertz faced a crowd of worried locals at the town senior center, hoping to sell them on his vision for their long-beloved—but now bankrupt—hospital. In worn blue jeans and an untucked shirt, the bearded entrepreneur from Denver pledged at a town-hall meeting in March to revive the Surprise Valley Community Hospital—a place many in the audience counted on to set their broken bones, stitch up cattle-tagging cuts, and tend to aging loved ones. Gertz said that if they voted on Tuesday to let him buy their tiny public hospital, he would retain such vital services. [node:read-more:link]

A Texas man was doing yard work when he spotted a four-foot rattlesnake. He beheaded the snake with a shovel—but when he went to dispose of it, the severed head bit him. The man received a massive dose of the snake’s venom. He became seriously ill and had to be air-lifted to a hospital, where he required a large number of doses of antivenom. A week later he remains in stable condition. The snake was reported to be a Western diamondback rattlesnake.This story is perhaps not as uncommon as it may seem, because snakes—like many other reptiles—retain their reflexes even hours after death. [node:read-more:link]