The Mars rover images a plume of debris from the impact of the descent stage that helped the spacecraft land safely on the red planet. Source: https://earthsky.org/todays-image/photo-mars-perseverance-descent-stage-smoke-plume…
Tag: all that
A combined map of almost 15,000 dust storms on Mars
Data in the world of astronomy is spread out in so many different places. There are archives for instruments on individual spacecraft and telescopes. Sometimes all that is needed to get new insight out of old data is to collect it all together and analyze a whole set rather than isolated instances. That is exactly what happened recently when a team…
Hand sanitizer is causing an epidemic of chemical burns to children’s eyes
All that sanitizer people have been using since the start of the COVID-19 epidemic has led to more than just dry hands and eye-watering smells: It’s nearly blinding some children. Source: https://www.livescience.com/covid-19-pandemic-hand-sanitizer-burns.html
Medical Study Suggests iPhone 12 With MagSafe Can Deactivate Pacemakers
AmiMoJo shares a report from 9to5Mac: When Apple revived MagSafe with the iPhone 12 lineup, one question brought up was how these latest devices with more magnets would interact with medical devices like pacemakers. Apple’s official word was that iPhone 12/MagSafe wouldn’t interfere more than previous iPhones. Now one of the first medical studies has been published by the Heart Rhythm…
Is Letterboxd Becoming a Blockbuster?
Early last decade, Matthew Buchanan and Karl von Randow, web designers based in Auckland, New Zealand, were seeking a passion project. Their business, a boutique web design studio called Cactuslab, developed apps and websites for various clients, but they wanted a project of their own that their team could plug away at when there wasn’t much else to do. From a…
Carbon Engineering’s Tech Will Suck Carbon From the Sky
“It’s not enough to slash greenhouse gas emissions,” warns a new article in IEEE Spectrum (shared by schwit1). “Experts say we need direct-air capture of atmospheric carbon.” West Texas is a hydrocarbon hot spot, with thousands of wells pumping millions of barrels of oil and billions of cubic feet of natural gas from the Permian Basin. When burned, all that oil…
Do Children Really Need To Learn To Code?
Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: In India, parents are being aggressively sold the idea that their children must start coding at 4 or 5 or be future failures, prompting Neelesh Misra [a writer, audio storyteller, and founder of a media and organic products company] to ask Do Children Really Need to Learn to Code? [Alternate URL here] In a New York…
Are We Experiencing a Great Software Stagnation?
Long-time programmer/researcher/former MIT research fellow Jonathan Edwards writes a blog called “Alarming Development: Dispatches from the User Liberation Front.” He began the new year by arguing that software “is eating the world. But progress in software technology itself largely stalled around 1996.” Slashdot reader tonique summarizes Edwards’ argument:
In 1996 there were “LISP, Algol, Basic, APL, Unix, C, Oracle, Smalltalk, Windows, C++,…
Farming Equipment is Beaming Back ‘Reams of Data’ To its Manufacturers
Farming equipment like combine harvesters “beam back reams of data to its manufacturer,” reports Forbes:
GPS records the combine’s precise path through the field as it moves. Sensors tally the number of crops gathered per acre and the spacing between them. On a sister machine called a planter, algorithms adjust the distribution of seeds based on which parts of the soil have…
Famous Earthrise photo taken on Christmas Eve
A Christmas Eve photograph showed humans their home world from a whole new perspective. This is the photo that’s said to have launched the environmental movement. It’s “Earthrise,” the iconic photo taken by astronaut William Anders on the 4th orbit of the moon aboard Apollo 8 on December 24, 1968. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/apollo-8-earthrise-december-24-1968-new-simulation…