David Roberts

The Dutch don’t wear bike helmets. How safe is it to ride a bike in the Netherlands?

Chris Bruntlett

We — like you — live in a place where helmets have been mandated by law, because they’ve been accepted as a commonsense safety device, normal as a seatbelt. But the Dutch show that [for them], safety in infrastructure, safety in slowing cars, and safety in numbers are all far more important than safety in body armor.

David Roberts

Yeah, the US approach seems to be to up-armor the cyclist so that cars don’t have to change.

Chris Bruntlett

Exactly.

Less than 0.5 percent of Dutch cyclists wear helmets, which is one in 200 people on bikes. And that’s really just the sport cyclists. Virtually everybody else, from children to old people, doesn’t even think about helmets. It’s just not present in their culture, because they’ve ultimately decided that it’s far more important to build this culture of everyday cycling, and to build safe streets, instead of requiring people to protect themselves.

https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/8/28/17789510/bike-cycling-netherlands-dutch-infrastructure

Polyesters, industrially produced from petroleum, are widely used in plastic bottles and clothing.

Current recycling processes mean that polyester materials follow a downward quality spiral, losing some of their properties each time they go through the cycle. Bottles become fleeces, then carpets, after which they often end up in landfill.

PETase reverses the manufacturing process, reducing polyesters to their building blocks, ready to be used again.

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-43783631

(Denis Diderot, Conversation between d’Alembert and Diderot [Entretien entre d’Alembert et Diderot], 1769)

I too haz this feels

https://xkcd.com/2102/

There is increasing evidence that sugar, glucose specifically, can influence central nervous system activity. Although memory enhancement was not demonstrated in any of the challenge studies which measured memory in children, there is evidence that glucose levels influence memory functioning in rats and humans, locomotor activity and sleep patterns in rats, and the distress associated with painful procedures in human infants. The focus of research in this area has been to establish how glucose acts to mediate these effects.

Since the retention of memory is an important central nervous system function in the process of cognition, central nervous system mechanisms salient to this function such as noradrenergic and cholinergic systems have been investigated. To investigate the positive effects of epinephrine on memory processing, one study systematically examined the effects of glucose on both animal and human subjects. The study (206) employed a foot shock avoidance task on rats, and observed, similar to the epinephrine effects, significantly improved retention in animals who received 10 to 100 mg/kg injection of glucose immediately after training. No effect was observed if the injection was delayed by one hour or if higher or lower doses were used. In a subsequent study (207), glucose was shown to have similar effects to other memory modulators in that its administration with low foot shock training enhanced the rats’ memory storage while its administration with high foot shock training impaired retention possibly due to endogenous levels of epinephrine produced by the foot shock.

Extending the postulate that glucose improves memory functioning to a human population, one study (208) demonstrated significantly improved memory processing via a standardized measure in nine of eleven elderly human subjects after administration of oral glucose versus placebo. Further, a study found that enhancement of memory in elderly humans twenty-four hours after learning was significantly improved by glucose administration before or after the learning task (209). This may be similar to the finding in rats where memory potentiation in elderly rats was more marked than that demonstrated in a young adult rat population (210). None of the studies of sugar in children showed any effect on memory while those completed with elderly subjects did. However, it is important to note that most of the child studies used sucrose and only a few of them specifically tested memory.

In summary, there is evidence that glucose is discretely involved in neuroendocrine modulation of memory storage in both rats and humans. This influence is best demonstrated in elderly subjects. Further, one site of action of glucose is the medial septum which is rich with communications to the hippocampus. Although, the precise mechanism of the effects of glucose on memory are not yet established, these findings may have far reaching implications for pharmacologic treatment of memory impairments resulting from old age or head trauma. As of now the clinical implications of these findings have yet to be defined. Much more extensive research is required before any conclusions about clinically relevant implications can be drawn.

http://www.fao.org/docrep/w8079e/w8079e0o.htm

This is hilarious 🙂

In that moment, it became my mission. With the help of fake reviews, mystique, and nonsense, I was going to do it: turn my shed into London’s top-rated restaurant on TripAdvisor.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/434gqw/i-made-my-shed-the-top-rated-restaurant-on-tripadvisor?utm_source=reddit.com

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/configurations

Love the feel of these.

Dimitris Ladopoulos (previously) creates random geometric patterns based on four-sided-forms by implementing an algorithm in the 3D animation program Houdini. The resulting designs look like intricate circuitboards or miniature architectural models, and include networks of gilded elements that glisten despite their digital composition. To create the works, the algorithm splits a rectangle vertically and then horizontally. “The number of splits is randomly selected from a given max,” he explains. “The outcome is fed to the loop, again and again, depending on the number of user defined iterations. A seed value and slight alterations of the algorithm produce a variety of results.”

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2019/01/landscapes-by-dimitris-ladopoulos/

‘A lot of the criticism seems to be driven by the notion that the FBI’s investigation was, and is, an effort to undermine or discredit President Trump. That assumption is wrong. The FBI’s investigation must be viewed in the context of the bureau’s decades-long effort to detect, disrupt and defeat the intelligence activities of the governments of the Soviet Union and later the Russian Federation that are contrary to the fundamental and long-term interests of the United States. The FBI’s counterintelligence investigation regarding the 2016 campaign fundamentally was not about Donald Trump but was about Russia. Full stop. It was always about Russia. It was about what Russia was, and is, doing and planning. Of course, if that investigation revealed that anyone—Russian or American—committed crimes in connection with Russian intelligence activities or unlawfully interfered with the investigation, the FBI has an obligation under the law to investigate such crimes and to seek to bring those responsible to justice. The FBI’s enduring counterintelligence mission is the reason the Russia investigation will, and should, continue—no matter who is fired, pardoned or impeached.’ (James Baker, formerly F!)BI General Counsel)

Put simply, I don’t believe the FBI, having an open counterintelligence investigation, simply opened a new criminal investigation of obstruction in the wake of the Comey firing. I think there likely was—and still is—one umbrella investigation with a number of different threads. That one investigation was (and is) about Russia. And it had (and still has), as a subsidiary matter, a number of subsidiary files open about people on the U.S. side who had links to Russian government activity. Each of these files had (and still has) all of the counterintelligence and criminal tools available to the U.S. government at its disposal.

So when the president sought to impair the investigation, having declared both in the draft letter dismissing Comey and to Lester Holt that his action was connected in some way to the Russia investigation, that raised both potential criminal questions and major counterintelligence questions—questions that could only have been reinforced when Trump later announced to senior Russian government officials that he had relieved pressure on himself by acting as he did. It did so both because it threatened the investigation itself and because it fit directly into a pattern of interface between Trump campaign officials and Russian government actors that they were already investigating.

https://www.lawfareblog.com/what-if-obstruction-was-collusion-new-york-timess-latest-bombshell

NASA astronomers have observed a supermassive black hole that is rotating at least 380 million miles per hour, or at half the speed of light.

To put that in perspective, that means the black hole—with a diameter 300 times larger than Earth—completes a rotation roughly every two minutes.

As detailed in a paper published Wednesday in Science, the team took the unprecedented measurement of the black hole’s rotation using observations from a suite of space-based x-ray observatories, including NASA’s Chandra telescope.

Astronomers were able to observe over 300,000 rotational cycles, giving the most precise measurement of a supermassive black hole ever taken.

The black hole, located about 290 million light years from Earth, first came to astronomers’ attention in 2014 after a strong burst of light was detected by optical telescopes. Upon closer investigation, astronomers discovered that the light was the result of a star getting torn to shreds by a supermassive black hole.

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/7xyg9d/astronomers-discover-a-supermassive-black-hole-rotating-at-half-the-speed-of-light