Educational or entertaining news from mainstream media and publications.
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Avoids items that are written to be divisive or derogatory without conveying new information.
Amazon bans books without reveal!ng why. Half of all books and 80% e-books are sold in the US by Amazon, so its ban is effective. A journalist author who's both-sides view of the Gaza war was banned, found (like others) they unbanned it after a media storm. But still no explanation about why they banned it.
Books bearing witness to the Oct. 7 slaughter and reporting the war from both sides are being barred for violating Amazon’s secretive “content guidelines.”
Russia was spurred to map undersea internet cables and test GPS interference after their Nord Stream 2 undersea gap pipeline was blown up. Medvedev, a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, posted: ”If we proceed from the proven complicity of Western countries in blowing up the Nord Streams, then we have no constraints - even moral - left to prevent us from destroying the ocean floor cable communications of our enemies".
The electronic communications and navigation systems the West depends on are vulnerable to Russian attack.
Plastic nanoparticles can now be removed from our drinking water. Plastics dumped in rivers and oceans slowly disintegrate into tiny pieces. They enter our bodies when eating fish or drinking water. They may be harmful. Water can now be purified with a few drops of a new solvent made from non-toxic naturally occuring materials. It binds to the nanoplastics then floats to the surface to be skimmed off.
Researchers have created a new liquid-based solution that eliminates more than 98% of these microscopic plastic particles from water.
Neural organoids are small lab-grown brains. You can now rent them for online computation and experiments. Each measure only half a millimeter but FinalSpark has thousands of them. If, as they plan, these become the basis of AI, they will appear more like real life than a similar-sized block of electronics.
In the search for less energy-hungry artificial intelligence, some scientists are exploring living computers
The oldest form of life has the most advanced hydrogen fuel cells - and we could learn from them. Archaea were around before bacteria, fungi, plants or animals. Some live where sunlight can't reach. Their hydrogen enzymes are the most efficient ever found, and may help us design green fuel cells.
Study has redefined their understanding of archaea, a microbial ancestor that lived two billion years ago and is linked to human evolution
Trump correctly stated that "creation of a fake image is ELECTION INTERFERENCE. Anyone who does that will cheat at ANYTHING!"
Hopefully, agreement on this point will herald a new era of reliance on independent verification of images and fact-checked statements.
Trump points to the reflection on Air Force 2, which he says shows an empty airport hanger. But photos and video footage from news organizations show thousands of people at the event.
A bored Chinese housewife scammed the Chinese Wikipedia with hundreds of interconnected articles on Russian medieval history. Her fictional accounts were supported by citations from random page numbers in mostly real but unread publications. The millions of characters have now been wiped. All that's left his her Apology at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:%E6%8A%98%E6%AF%9B
She “single-handedly invented a new way to undermine Wikipedia,” says a Wikipedian.
The hunger-ending hormone GLP-1 quietens the brain pathways always looking for food. Supplying it artificially, with drugs like Ozempic, also removes cravings for alcohol, co***ne, opioids, and gambling. These reward centers kept us alive when food was short, but for some, they keep nagging for more.
Blockbuster weight-loss drugs are revealing how appetite, pleasure and addiction work in the brain
“The Feast of the Gods" by Jan Harmensz van Bijlert (1630) was the inspiration behind the Olympics opening ceremony tableaux. It shows Bacchus cavorting in front of the feasters, who was painted blue in Thomas Jolly's depiction of the Olympian gods. Christians complained that it reminded them of Da Vinci's "Last Supper" - even Trump and Musk joined in the righteous indignation.
Critics of the opening ceremony betrayed their ignorance of Christianity’s pagan roots — and the real reason behind their ire toward the show.
Glaciers have retreated back to levels 12,000 years ago. They are ceasing to supply fresh river water in areas that have little rain during the summer. About a quarter of humans have relied on this throughout history, and they may now have to live elsewhere. This change is faster than initially forecast by climate scientists.
Roughly one out of every four people on Earth depends on freshwater supplied by the glacial regions that cover 10 percent of our planet's surface.
Alcoholism has been cured - in monkeys, at least. Some monkeys, like some humans, can become alcoholics, and after compulsory abstinence they immediately relapse. A gene therapy can now restore glial-derived neurotrophic factor (GDNF) to the normal non-alcoholic levels. Treated monkeys prefer water to alcohol.
Each year, the grip of alcohol addiction tightens around countless families, shattering lives and leaving millions in its wake.
The Mammoth carbon capture facility in Iceland changes 36,000 tonnes of CO2 a year into underground stone, at $1000/tonne. This huge project reverses the effect of only 8,000 petrol cars - ie one small town on the planet. Filtering a smokestack or changing to an electric car would be cheaper. But corporations are willing to pay, to offset their carbon balance sheet.
In Iceland a new plant is capturing and storing CO2 directly from the atmosphere.
China's reduced smog is raising temperatures because it used to reflect sunlight. Since 2013, the Pacific Ocean has been witnessing a warming event known as "The Blob," which periodically increases water temperatures between California and Alaska by as much as seven degrees Fahrenheit.
The decline in smog particles has offered less shading protection from the sun's rays, which has increased the rate of ocean warming.
Soft robot limbs made of flexing rubber rather than metal can be made cheaply by 3D printing. The rubber tubes straighten, bend or twist, controlled by small motors. A prototype can coordinate to crawl through a tube. The hope is not only cheaper robots but softer ones, so bumps don't become bruises.
Engineers have developed a new soft, flexible device that makes robots move by expanding and contracting — just like a human muscle.
The loss of India's vultures is costing $70bn a year in health care. They devour a carcase to the bone in 45 minutes. Now dead cattle are eaten by feral dogs, giving India the highest rabies rate. Or farmers dump them in rivers causing disease downstream. Cattle were given diclofenac - a painkiller used for various conditions - but it is toxic to vultures. That is now being stopped, but vultures breed slowly.
Scientists say a common painkiller used on cattle wiped out India's vultures, resulting in half a million human deaths in just 5 years.
Kings (unlike US Presidents) were never above the law. When King John tried it, his barons wrote the Magna Carta. He tried instituting fines for anyone who made him angry. They were called “amercements” because they paid for the king's mercy.
Even Louis XIV of France, the epitome of absolute monarchy, did not stand above the law. Kings have always been defined and constrained by legal precedent.
Meta is giving away an AI arguably as powerful as ChatGPT 4o, to run on your own hardware. It can't run on a typical PC, but the server needed is affordable - unlike the months of time on 16,000 GPUs that trained it. Its called Llama 405B after it's capacity of 405 billion parameters that enable it to handle large documents and extended conversations.
"Open source AI is the path forward," says Mark Zuckerberg, misusing the term.
A hacker in North Korea almost managed to become a trusted remote worker for a software security firm. He applied using an AI-generated photo, and accessed his assigned laptop by VPN. When he loaded hacking tools onto it they called the FBI.
Security awareness company KnowBe4 noticed something was fishy when the employee's company-issued Mac began loading malware.
The DeepMind AI in London now forecasts 10-day weather better than the world's best supercomputers - in minutes instead of hours of computation. It has been trained on decades of weather data but doesn't just use pattern recognition. It also applies physics - something that other AIs are woefully poor at. See it live at https://charts.ecmwf.int/products/graphcast_medium-mslp-wind850
Our state-of-the-art model delivers 10-day weather predictions at unprecedented accuracy in under one minute
$1000/month, no strings attached - the biggest study of it's kind has published results after three years. The 1000 low-income Americans were compared with another 1000 who were paid $50/month to fill the same questionnaires. The extra money was spent on food, rent, dentists, supporting family members and starting up businesses. It also resulted in working 1.3 fewer hours per week on average - mostly due to younger participants taking training programs and a mum home-schooling her autistic child.
For three years, 1,000 people received $1,000 per month — no strings attached. They took better jobs. Some went back to school. Others started opening businesses.
Bone growth is stimulated even in old age when applying MBH - Maternal Brain Hormone. The vague name of this newly discovered hormone mirrors how little is known about it. It was discovered in female mice after giving birth and suckling their young. They lose much calcium in the milk, so their bones are stimulated to absorb it. It was previously missed because much less research is done on female systems. However, it may help male seniors as much as females.
A new study found that a hormone produced in the brains of lactating mice helps strengthen bones, which can potentially treat fractures and osteoporosis.
Centuries of English parish records have busted myths about the population. The average age that women married was never under 24 between 1550 and 1950. Marriage was generally delayed till the couple could afford to set up home separate from their parents. In the 14th century, England became the only country to legislate that a husband automatically owns his wife's property - and no other country adopted this for 500 years. Women commonly worked outside the home. In the 1700s about 90% of women worked before and after marriage. This fell to about 40% when mechanisation came in the 1850s. This weekly blog is slowly revealing English life from actual records.
Today the small nuclear family dominates across much of the world. Following World War II this prevailing family form was associated with modernity – the product of a post-industrial society. But just how modern is the modern nuclear family?
Solar panels over fish farms are win-win. The cooler waters can boost growth by 50% And the solar panels don't occupy otherwise valuable land.
Installing solar panels over fish farms can help boost seafood harvests by 50% while generating huge amounts of pollution-free electricity.
Uruguay has increased its forested areas by 46%, Cuba by 30%, Uzbekistan, Vietnam and China by 24%. China is so huge that their total is the size of Sweden. Everyone knows this is a good idea, but these centralised governments don't need permissions to get things done.
One country is taking reforestation very seriously, registering more than 400,000 square km of forest growth in two decades.
American churches are fast losing attendees. Sociologists point out that, aside from any spiritual implications, religiously unaffiliated Americans are less likely to volunteer, less likely to feel satisfied with their community and social life, and more likely to say they feel lonely.
(OPINION) I’ve long argued it’s difficult — really, next to impossible — to practice Christianity effectively without becoming (and staying) an active member of a local church congregation. Not only Christianity but the other major faiths are, by intention and maybe by definition, comm...
Alzheimer’s can be transmitted like Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) by ingesting or injecting brain tissue from an already-afflicted individual. Both can be caused by prions - bodies of badly folded proteins that cause similar proteins to mis-shape. In the case of Alzheimer’s, this is the amyloid-beta that forms plaques to displace neurones. Such transmission is rare, but has been observed after the old medical procedure of injecting growth hormone harvested from cadavers.
In a groundbreaking discovery, scientists have presented the first evidence of Alzheimer's disease transmission in living individuals.
A different perspective on Hamas, from a Gazan who, along with 1300 others peaceful protesters against Hamas in 2023, were imprisoned and tortured by Hamas.
"Hamas has effectively kidnapped the Gaza strip and all its inhabitants and routinely terrorizes them, these crimes are never reported by Arabic media or western media, nor by global human rights organizations, all of which tend to portray Hamas as a legitimate resistance group who are trying to 'liberate' the Palestinians."
He has seen war crimes by both sides, but complains that the media are on the side of Hamas rather than Gazans who are afflicted by both sides.
The sad truth is, when Israelis aren't involved, no one is interested in advocating for the Palestinian rights they claim to care about so deeply.
Wagner still operates in Africa a year after Prigozhin's death. It is now more openly operated as a Russian force nicknamed the Africa Corps. The offer a “regime survival package” for leaders under pressure - usually from their own population. In exchange, Russia gets access to strategically important natural resources.
Moscow has effectively replaced the mercenary group's influence in Africa and Ukraine, experts say.
The grand piano has had a redesign. It has the same huge keyboards and characteristic three foot pedals, but the sound comes out the back so the player can face the audience. The gradually shorter strings firm a pleasing spiral. But many won't like the link between keys and strings: the hammers are electric solenoids.
The grand piano hadn't seen major changes in over 300 years. Now, it's had a major redesign.
Catapulting satellites into space will start in 2026 after a decade of development and successful test launches. SpinLaunch doesn't need the 900,000 pounds of fuel used by each SpaceX's Falcon launch - it just uses electricity. The satellites need to withstand 10,000G so this won't include humans.
This technology revolutionizes the way satellites are sent into space, using a giant rotating arm to fling satellites into low Earth orbit
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