It already takes more energy to operate Bitcoin than to mine actual gold. Cryptocurrencies are responsible for millions of tons of CO2 emissions. (Source: Nature) “Half of countries have fertility rates below the replacement level, so if nothing happens the populations will decline in those countries” (source:BBC) According to Dickenson et al., 8.6% of us … Continue reading Science and Technology links (November 10th, 2018)
Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency, could greatly accelerate climate change, should it succeed beyond its current speculative state. Crows can solve novel problems very quickly with tools they have never seen before. The new video game Red Dead Redemption 2 made $725 million in three days. Tesla, the electric car company, is outselling Mercedes Benz and BMW … Continue reading Science and Technology links (November 3rd, 2018)
If you take kids born in the 1980s, who do you think did better, the rich kids or the poor kids? The answer might surprise you: The children from the poorest families ended up twice as well-off as their parents when they became adults. The children from the poorest families had the largest absolute gains … Continue reading Science and Technology links (October 28th, 2018)
Should we stop eating meat to combat climate change? Maybe not. White and Hall worked out what happened if the US stopped using farm animals: The modeled system without animals (…) only reduced total US greenhouse gas emissions by 2.6 percentage units. Compared with systems with animals, diets formulated for the US population in the … Continue reading Science and Technology links (October 20th, 2018)
Chronic exposure to canola oil results in a significant increase in body weight and impairments in working memory… in mice. (Source: Nature) Belly fat is not just fat in reserve, it signals your body through hormones. Some of these signals might be helpful, but some are not. Visceral fat is strongly associated with prostate cancer … Continue reading Science and Technology links (October 13th, 2018)
Ibuprofen extends lifespan in many species including, maybe, human beings. Donna Strickland is the third women to win a Nobel prize in Physics. It appears that she won the prize for one 1985 article. Her scientific publications are available on Google Scholar. She is maybe one more example of the fact that it only takes … Continue reading Science and Technology links (October 6th, 2018)
Oculus is launching a new standalone virtual-reality headset next year, the Oculus Quest. It is the price of a console like the Nintendo Switch, and might have comparable computational power. It does not need to be tethered to a PC (it is wireless). It should have top-notch virtual reality with six degrees of freedom, meaning … Continue reading Science and Technology links (September 30th, 2018)
Apple benefits from the chip-making technology of a company called TSMC. This company has surpassed Intel in transistor density. Thus, in some sense, the microprocessors in Apple’s latest iPhone are more advanced than the microprocessors you find in brand-new PCs. Here is a provocative opinion piece: For decades, the medical community has ignored mountains of … Continue reading Science and Technology links (September 22nd, 2018)
I was told repeatedly throughout my life that the normal body temperature was 37.5°C. This estimate is over a hundred years old and flawed. It is off by one degree: a better “normal” is 36.5°C. According to Malhotra et al., heart disease is a chronic inflammatory condition (meaning that it is related to a dysfunction … Continue reading Science and Technology links (September 15th, 2018)
Most research articles are not available for free to the public, even when the research was fully funded by the public. To legally access research articles, one typically needs to go through a college library which pays for access (often with public dollars). Major European agencies have thus decided that by 2020, research that they … Continue reading Science and Technology links (September 8th, 2018)