James' World 2

Click the link below the picture

.

It was happy hour at the whitewashed hotel on the remote volcanic island of Salina, perched in the Tyrrhenian Sea, a short hydrofoil ride from northern Sicily. Around the pool, honeymooning couples, including my husband and me, drank tamarind margaritas and watched the sunset against Salina’s sister island Stromboli, which puffed out plumes of volcanic smoke into the encroaching dusk.

It was as romantic as I hoped it would be when booking the trip a year earlier – with one unanticipated and starkly unromantic caveat. A woman on one of the sun loungers had Zoomed into her New York work meeting, running through a pitch deck and talking loudly about ROI.

People run away to remote islands on vacation to pretend for a moment that the real world – the world of corporate culture and incessant demands on your time and energy – doesn’t exist. But with that one Zoom call, the mirage was dispelled. All of the disbelief we had collectively suspended came crashing down as we were sucked, unwillingly, into someone else’s remote working experience.

As good, reliable Wi-Fi becomes available in increasingly far-flung locations, there are few places it’s truly impossible to work from. I’m not immune to the lure of this lifestyle myself. I’m definitely guilty of camping at tables with plug sockets in coffee shops around Europe. But I came away from my honeymoon experience asking the question: Just because you can work from anywhere these days, does that mean you should?

.

Robert Rodriguez/CNET

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

With more than 9 billion gigabytes of information traveling the internet every day, researchers are constantly looking for new ways to compress data into smaller packages. Cutting-edge techniques focus on lossy approaches, which achieve compression by intentionally “losing” information from a transmission. Google, for instance, recently unveiled a lossy strategy where the sending computer drops details from an image and the receiving computer uses artificial intelligence to guess the missing parts. Even Netflix uses a lossy approach, downgrading video quality whenever the company detects that a user is watching on a low-resolution device.

Very little research, by contrast, is currently being pursued on lossless strategies, where transmissions are made smaller, but no substance is sacrificed. The reason? Lossless approaches are already remarkably efficient. They power everything from the PNG image standard to the ubiquitous software utility PKZip. And it’s all because of a graduate student who was simply looking for a way out of a tough final exam.

Seventy years ago, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor named Robert Fano offered the students in his information theory class a choice: Take a traditional final exam, or improve a leading algorithm for data compression. Fano may or may not have informed his students that he was an author of that existing algorithm, or that he’d been hunting for an improvement for years. What we do know is that Fano offered his students the following challenge.

Consider a message made up of letters, numbers, and punctuation. A straightforward way to encode such a message would be to assign each character a unique binary number. For instance, a computer might represent the letter A as 01000001 and an exclamation point as 00100001. This results in codes that are easy to parse — every eight digits, or bits, correspond to one unique character — but horribly inefficient, because the same number of binary digits is used for both common and uncommon entries. A better approach would be something like Morse code, where the frequent letter E is represented by just a single dot, whereas the less common Q requires the longer and more laborious dash-dash-dot-dash.

.

Kristina Armitage/Quanta Magazine

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

.

Peter Kramer, a reporter at the USA Today Network, joined Gannett colleagues on Renaissance Plaza in White Plains, N.Y., to voice grievances on Monday. Credit…Karsten Moran for The New York Times

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

https://www.nytimes.com

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

I’m going to admit upfront that I’m a big Windex girl. It’s cheap, it’s always available, and it’s easy to spray on everything from mirrors (normal!) to tabletops (nor normal!) for a quick rubdown. It turns out, though, that you’re really not supposed to use the specialty glass cleaner for everything, as it can cause real damage to certain surfaces. Here’s what you should really avoid spraying.

Plexiglass

This is a surprising one, but you can’t use Windex on Plexiglass, so if you have any art framed in some or any other decor made from it, put the bottle down. Per Reader’s Digest, some Windex products contain ammonia, which will ruin the material. You can use the ammonia-free version, but you have to make sure that’s what you have. Buy it here for about $4.

Scummy shower doors

Reader’s Digest also cautions against using Windex on shower doors, of all things, if the doors are full of soap scum. Windex just doesn’t break that down well. The good news is you can just use regular old dish soap or a Mr. Clean Magic Eraser to get the scum off. Prevent scum altogether by keeping a dish wand filled with dish soap in the shower and using it to clean the interior every time you take a rinse yourself. Once your shower doors are free of gunk, you can use Windex, but you probably won’t even have to.

.

Photo: Andrey_Popov (Shutterstock)

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

Last Friday, NASA awarded a $3.4 billion contract to a team led by Blue Origin for the design and construction of a second Human Landing System to fly astronauts down to the Moon.

The announcement capped a furious two-year lobbying campaign by Blue Origin owner Jeff Bezos to obtain a coveted piece of NASA’s Artemis program. NASA also notched a big win, gaining the competition with SpaceX it sought for landing services. But there is a more profound takeaway from this.

After losing the initial lander contract to SpaceX two years ago, Blue Origin did not just bid a lower price this time around. Instead, it radically transformed the means by which it would put humans on the Moon. The Blue Moon lander is now completely reusable; it will remain in lunar orbit, going up and down to the surface. It will be serviced by a transport vehicle that will be fueled in low-Earth orbit and then deliver propellant to the Moon. This transporter, in turn, will be refilled by multiple launches of the reusable New Glenn rocket.

To be sure, that is a lot of hardware that has yet to be built and tested. But when we step back, there is one inescapable fact. With SpaceX’s fully reusable Starship, and now Blue Moon, NASA has selected two vehicles based around the concept of many launches and the capability to store and transfer propellant in space.

This is a remarkable transformation in the way humans will explore outer space—potentially the biggest change in spaceflight since the Soviet Union launched the Sputnik satellite in 1957. It has been a long time coming.

.

In this illustration, SpaceX’s Starship vehicle is seen landing on the Moon.

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

In 2034, a small craft will alight on a distant dune in a place called Shangri-la. This craft, called Dragonfly, will have traveled 746 million miles to eventually land on Saturn’s largest—and most alluring—moon, Titan.

Dragonfly is a radical new approach to studying other worlds. Rather than being bound to slowly creep over the surface, as our Mars rovers have been, it is a rotorcraft, capable of flying several miles at a time. It will hop around from place to place to help us better understand this strange land, where the atmosphere is nitrogen, the dunes are made from ice, the seas are liquid methane, and a potentially globe-wide water ocean may be buried deep below the frozen surface.

The planned Dragonfly mission, set to launch in four years, will include an impressive assortment of remote planetary exploration tools: several cameras that operate at different wavelengths to image the intriguing landscape, a small drill and scoop to collect samples, a mass spectrometer to determine the chemical makeup of those samples, a gamma-ray and neutron spectrometer to study the composition of the surface directly under the craft, and a suite of meteorological and geological sensors to record Titan’s weather patterns and search for evidence of larger-scale activity (such as cryovolcanoes that might spew liquid water instead of lava). This suite of gear will help us get our first true taste of what Titan is really like—and whether it might be holding any important solar system secrets, like whether life could be present beyond our own world.

To date, we have only sent one lonely mission to Titan. Launched in 1997, the Cassini spacecraft carried a small payload: the Huygens probe. While Cassini spent nearly two decades in orbit around Saturn, the Huygens probe lasted less than a month between deployment from its parent spacecraft and the end of its operations, a mere hour and a half after touchdown on Titan’s rugged surface.

.

What future missions to Saturn’s moon Titan will reveal about the universe.

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

https://nautil.us

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

The global ocean hit a new record temperature of 21.1 ºC in early April, 0.1 ºC higher than the last record in March 2016. Although striking, the figure (see ‘How the ocean is warming’) is in line with the ocean warming anticipated from climate change. What is remarkable is its occurrence ahead of — rather than during — the El Niño climate event that is expected to bring warmer, wetter weather to the eastern Pacific region later this year.

That means warmer-than-average ocean temperatures are likely to persist or even intensify, bringing with them more-extreme weather and marine heatwaves, which spell problems for marine life from corals to whales.

“We are probably looking at a string of record highs over the next year or so,” says Josh Willis, an oceanographer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “This coming year is gonna be a wild ride if the El Niño really takes off.”

The El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is a natural, cyclical climate pattern. During the El Niño phase, winds over the Pacific are weakened or reversed, allowing warm waters to slosh eastwards in the Pacific. El Niño tends to coincide with warmer years, both in the ocean and on land. The previous record of 21.0 ºC, for example, occurred during a very strong El Niño event.

ENSO is currently in a neutral phase, coming out of a rare extended three-year period of La Niña (the opposite phase to El Niño). But El Niño is expected to kick in this year: according to the World Meteorological Organization, there is a 60% chance of it developing between May and July, and an up to 80% chance of it happening by October.

.

Warm oceans can bleach and kill corals. Credit: Juergen Freund/NPL

.

.

Click the link below for article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

Neuroscience has made progress in deciphering how our brains think and perceive our surroundings, but a central feature of cognition is still deeply mysterious: namely, that many of our perceptions and thoughts are accompanied by the subjective experience of having them. Consciousness, the name we give to that experience, can’t yet be explained — but science is at least beginning to understand it. In this episode, the consciousness researcher Anil Seth and host Steven Strogatz discuss why our perceptions can be described as a “controlled hallucination,” how consciousness played into the internet sensation known as “the dress,” and how people at home can help researchers catalog the full range of ways that we experience the world.

Steven Strogatz (00:03): I’m Steve Strogatz, and this is The Joy of Why, a podcast from Quanta Magazine that takes you into some of the biggest unanswered questions in math and science today. In this episode, we’re going to be discussing the mystery of consciousness. The mystery being that when your brain cells fire in certain patterns, it actually feels like something. It might feel like jealousy or a toothache, or the memory of your mother’s face, or the scent of her favorite perfume. But other patterns of brain activity don’t really feel like anything at all. Right now, for instance, I’m probably forming some memories somewhere deep in my brain. But the process of that memory formation is imperceptible to me. I can’t feel it. It doesn’t give rise to any sort of internal subjective experience at all. In other words, I’m not conscious of it.

.

Peter Greenwood for Quanta Magazine

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

With the help of an expert weaver, archaeologists have unraveled the design secrets behind the world’s oldest pants. The 3,000-year-old wool trousers belonged to a man buried between 1000 and 1200 BCE in Western China. To make them, ancient weavers combined four different techniques to create a garment specially engineered for fighting on horseback, with flexibility in some places and sturdiness in others.

The softer side of materials science

Most of us don’t think much about pants these days, except to lament having to put them on in the morning. But trousers were actually a technological breakthrough. Mounted herders and warriors needed their leg coverings to be flexible enough to let the wearer swing a leg across a horse without ripping the fabric or feeling constricted. At the same time, they needed some added reinforcement at crucial areas like the knees. It became, to some extent, a materials-science problem. Where do you want something elastic, and where do you want something strong? And how do you make fabric that will accomplish both?

For the makers of the world’s oldest pants, produced in China around 3,000 years ago, the answer was apparently to use different weaving techniques to produce fabric with specific properties in certain areas, despite weaving the whole garment out of the same spun wool fiber.

The world’s oldest-known pants were part of the burial outfit of a warrior now called Turfan Man. He wore the woven wool pants with a poncho that belted around the waist, ankle-high boots, and a wool headband adorned with seashells and bronze discs. The pants’ basic design is strikingly similar to the pants most of us wear today, but closer inspection reveals the level of engineering that went into designing them.

.

Photo by Wagner et al. 2022

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

.

__________________________________________