The absolutely brilliant Bret Victor has done a fantastic piece about technologists and what role they can play in averting catastrophic climate change. Even if you’re not a technologist, this piece is remarkable: it’s one of the most lucid explanations of clean energy and climate change that I’ve ever seen, full of both well-written text and fantastic visualizations. I recommend it very highly.
What can a technologist do about climate change? A personal view.
Quite a bit of interesting info on this page.
HRQOL is a broad multidimensional concept that usually includes self-reported measures of physical and mental health.
For example, here’s a map of unhealthiness by state (2009 data):
To approach the subject of red mercury is to journey into a comic-book universe, a zone where the stubborn facts of science give way to unverifiable claims, fantasy and outright magic, and where villains pursuing the dark promise of a mysterious weapon could be rushing headlong to the end of the world. This is all the more remarkable given the broad agreement among nonproliferation specialists that red mercury, at least as a chemical compound with explosive pop, does not exist.
Legends of red mercury’s powers began circulating by late in the Cold War. But their breakout period came after the Soviet Union’s demise, when disarray and penury settled over the Kremlin’s arms programs. As declining security fueled worries of illicit trafficking, red mercury embedded itself in the lexicon of the freewheeling black-market arms bazaar. Aided by credulous news reports, it became an arms trafficker’s marvelous elixir, a substance that could do almost anything a shady client might need: guide missiles, shield objects from radar, equip a rogue underdog state or terrorist group with weapons rivaling those of a superpower. It was priced accordingly, at hundreds of thousands of dollars a kilogram. With time, the asking price would soar.
Champion of regeneration, the freshwater polyp Hydra is capable of reforming a complete individual from any fragment of its body. It is even able to remain alive when all its neurons have disappeared. Researcher the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, have discovered how: cells of the epithelial type modify their genetic program by overexpressing a series of genes, among which some are involved in diverse nervous functions. Studying Hydra cellular plasticity may thus influence research in the context of neurodegenerative diseases. The results are published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.
“Every day, it was like every device on the menu got crushed,” Rios says. “It was all bad. Really, really bad.” The teams didn’t have time to dive deeply into the vulnerabilities they found, partly because they found so many—defenseless operating systems, generic passwords that couldn’t be changed, and so on.
The Mayo Clinic emerged from those sessions with a fresh set of security requirements for its medical device suppliers, requiring that each device be tested to meet standards before purchasing contracts were signed. Rios applauded the clinic, but he knew that only a few hospitals in the world had the resources and influence to pull that off, and he walked away from the job with an unshakable conviction: Sooner or later, hospitals would be hacked, and patients would be hurt. He’d gotten privileged glimpses into all sorts of sensitive industries, but hospitals seemed at least a decade behind the standard security curve.
“Someone is going to take it to the next level. They always do,” says Rios. “The second someone tries to do this, they’ll be able to do it. The only barrier is the goodwill of a stranger.”
Source: Hospital Gear Could Save Your Life Or Hack Your Identity – Bloomberg Business
The night i saw my first black helicopter—or heard it, because black helicopters are invisible at night—I was already growing certain that we, the sensible majority, owe plenty of so-called crackpots a few apologies. We dismissed them, shrugging off as delusions or urban legends various warnings and anecdotes that now stand revealed, in all too many instances, as either solid inside tips or spooky marvels of intuition.
The Atlantic: If You’re Not Paranoid, You’re Crazy
Compared to certain animals, humans have pretty limited vision. We see in a mere three color wavelengths (combinations of red, blue, and green), while the eyes of dragonflies, for example, process 12, giving them ultra-multicolor vision. But now, with design studioMarshmallow Laser Feast‘s new virtual reality helmets, you don’t have to wait to be reincarnated as an insect to see the world the way super-sighted animals do.
Called “In the Eyes of the Animal,” these globular helmets use virtual reality technology to create real-time artistic interpretations of how a forest might look to three of its animal inhabitants: a dragonfly, an owl, and a frog. Marshmallow Laser Feast designers Robin McNicholas, Barney Steel, and Adam Doherty used data taken from LiDAR (remote sensing technology), CT scans, and aerial drone footage to achieve these sense-hacking effects.
Mossy Virtual Reality Helmets Let You See the Forest as Animals Do
This is a story about viruses that became domesticated by parasitic wasps, which use them as biological weapons for corrupting the bodies of caterpillars, which in turn can steal the viral genes and incorporate them into their own genomes, where they protect the caterpillars from yet more viruses. Evolution, you have outdone yourself with this one. The wasps in question are called braconids. There are more than 17,000 known species, and they’re all parasites. The females lay their eggs in the bodies of still-living caterpillars, which their grubs then devour alive.
As early as 1967, scientists realised that the wasps were also injecting the caterpillars with some kind of small particle, alongside their eggs. It took almost a decade to realise that those particles were viruses, which have since become known as bracoviruses. Each species of braconid wasp has its own specific bracovirus, but they all do the same thing: They suppress the caterpillar’s immune system and tweak its metabolism to favour the growing wasp. Without these viral allies, the wasp grubs would be killed by their host bodies.
So, the viruses are essential for the wasps—but the reverse is also true. Unlike most other kinds of virus, these bracoviruses cannot make copies of themselves. They are only manufactured in the ovaries of the wasps, and once they get into the caterpillars, their life cycle ends. Some might say they’re not true viruses are all. They’re almost like secretions of the wasp’s body…
Parasitic Wasps Genetically Engineer Caterpillars Using Domesticated Viruses – The Atlantic
