Science

Spinach Detectors

Engineers at MIT have used spinach to detect explosive materials in groundwater. Carbon nanotubes in the spinach leaves emit a signal when the routes detect nitroaromatics, often found in landmines, which is picked up by an infrared camera that triggers an email to alert scientists.

Environment

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Indoor Infection Risk Calculator

#247

Airborne.cam is a calculator that displays the individual risk of COVID-19 infection indoors based on a number of input factors, such as size of the room, the type of ventilation, and the period of time spent in the room.

Life

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2020s Technology

#245

Eli Dourado published an interesting technology prediction blog post looking at what the 2020s could bring to us in terms of technology advancements.

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10 Remarkable Discoveries of 2020

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Nature published a list of 10 remarkable discoveries of 2020 which include the violation of matter-antimatter symmetry, the connection between the shifting jetstream and the ozone layer, and the DNA based discovery of incest between the people buried in Newgrange.

History

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Trees Vs Semilattices

#243

Taylor Pearson published an interesting post describes the disadvantages and fragility of categorising the world using trees rather than using the more efficient semilattices.

Business

Life

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VLF Space Barrier

#242

NASA scientists have discovered an energy barrier around the earth that protects us from radiation and that is accidentally man made. The barrier is made of VLF (very low frequency) radio waves, which are generally used to communication with underwater submarines but have been leaking into the atmosphere.

Science

Space

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Space Spiders

#242

Someone decided that it was a good idea to put spiders on the International Space Station! Experiments with the space spiders (!) have shown that the spiders need a point of reference when building their webs and that light can be used as that reference in the absence of gravity. With no point of reference the spiders spin symmetrical webs in zero-g.

Science

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Fish Farmers

#241

Researchers at Griffith & Deaking universities have found proof that longfin damselfish have domesticated mysid shrimp. These damselfish farm algae for food, and use the mysid shrimp feces as fertilizer. They even protect the shrimp from other fish outside the farm that try to eat the shrimp.

Life

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Podcast of the Week: NPR Shortwave on Measuring Everest

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NPR Shortwave have a very informative episode about the difficulties in accurately measuing the height of Mount Everest. It turns out there are quiet a few caveats that need to be accounted for.

Podcast

Science

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Indistinguishability Obfuscation

#239

Indistinguishability Obfuscation (iO) is a crytographic protocol which was thought to be impossible until Aayush Jain and his advisor Amit Sahai from UCLA, together with Huijia Lin from the University of Washington, published a paper acheived IO using standard security assumptions. The purpose of iO, as I understand it, is to allow two pieces of the same data to be encrypted with all but one element being different, e.g. a key, and it would be impossible to determine the difference by comparing the two encrypted results.

Innovation

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