Showing posts with label energy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label energy. Show all posts

Thursday, August 20, 2020

Friday Thinking 21 Aug 2020

Friday Thinking is a humble curation of my foraging in the digital environment. Choices are based on my own curiosity and that suggest we are in the midst of a change in the conditions of change - a phase-transition. That tomorrow will be radically unlike yesterday.


Many thanks to those who enjoy this.

In the 21st Century curiosity is what skills the cat -

for life of skillful means .

Jobs are dying - Work is just beginning.

Work that engages our whole self becomes play that works.


The emerging world-of-connected-everything - digital environment - 

computational ecology - 

may still require humans as the consciousness of its own existence. 


To see red - is to know other colors - without the ground of others - there is no figure - differences that make a defference.  


‘There are times, ‘when I catch myself believing there is something which is separate from something else.’


“Be careful what you ‘insta-google-tweet-face’”

Woody Harrelson - Triple 9


Content
Quotes:

Big space

The city is a lie

The story of how web browsers changed us forever

The Big Tech firms are dividing the world between them



Articles:

The company behind Fortnite dared Apple to shutter its game on iPhones. Now Apple has gone ahead and sort of done that.

We need a full investigation into Siri's secret surveillance campaign

Placebos prove powerful even when people know they're taking one

‘AeroNabs’ Promise Powerful, Inhalable Protection Against COVID-19

Team develops peptide that makes drug-resistant bacteria sensitive to antibiotics again

Gene manipulation using algae could grow more crops with less water

Extra DNA May Make Unlikely Hybrid Fish Possible

Android is now the world’s largest earthquake detection network

Highly efficient process makes seawater drinkable in 30 minutes

Seven top oil firms downgrade assets by $87bn in nine months



Our everyday experience tells us that space has three dimensions. Front/back, left/right, up/down. In physics, we describe time as a fourth dimension, and wrap the whole thing up as spacetime – a kind of bendy 4D cosmic grid. The malleability of spacetime, a basic tenet of Albert Einstein’s relativity, allows that grid to warp and stretch in response to the motion and mass of everything in it. It’s why space can expand and distort the passage of time, and why time moves more slowly if you’re in a fast rocket or hanging out near a black hole.


However, physicists have been wondering for years whether the three dimensions of space we experience might be only part of the picture. If there are more spatial dimensions, extending out in new directions we can’t perceive, that could help to explain some puzzling aspects of theoretical physics and the behaviour of gravity. Add an extra dimension of space to the Universe, and you find that gravity can ‘leak’ out into it, making the force seem weaker than it really is, and potentially explaining why its strength is so minuscule compared with the forces governing particle physics.

Big space



The city is a lie that we tell ourselves. The crux of this lie is that we can separate human life from the environment, using concrete, glass, steel, maps, planning and infrastructure to forge a space apart. Disease, dirt, wild animals, wilderness, farmland and countryside are all imagined to be essentially outside, forbidden and excluded. This idea is maintained through the hiding of infrastructure, the zoning of space, the burying of rivers, the visualisation of new urban possibilities, even the stories we tell about cities. Whenever the outside pierces the city, the lie is exposed. When we see the environment reassert itself, the scales fall from our eyes.


Of course, cities are physically identifiable sites that are often clearly separated from the space around them. They might be surrounded by walls that define their limits, or green belts in which building is prohibited or heavily controlled. Even when large suburban districts surround the city, these often have separate governance systems. Nonetheless, all cities depend on a much wider territory beyond these boundary markers. Some or all of the following need to be brought in from outside to support an urban centre: food, water, building materials (wood, stone etc), workers, traders and their goods, raw production materials (wool, cotton etc), energy (in the form of material to be consumed, such as oil or coal, or on cables connected to a production centre such as a power plant or wind farm). This is the case irrespective of whether the city concerned has a clear physical edge or not.

The city is a lie



One day, Internet Explorer was nearly the only game in town, powering 96% of website visits at its peak in 2002. Then, quickly it turned into the app you only used to download Firefox or Chrome, or so the joke went. And then Internet Explorer died and turned into Chrome.


Empires rise then quickly fall in tech. One year, the web was merely a vision “about anything being potentially connected with anything,” as inventor Tim Berners-Lee put it before releasing the web in late 1990. 5 years later, Microsoft would bundle its Internet Explorer web browser with Windows—something the U.S. Department of Justice called anti-competitive in 1998.


From creating an industry to lawsuits over monopolizing said industry in under a decade may be a record. But that’s the web. Everything moves faster online, from the dot-com boom and bust to today’s smartphone-powered world.


It’s almost hard to remember a world without browser, and tabs, and bookmarks.

The story of how web browsers changed us forever



In his concluding chapter, Ball draws an apt comparison between the system of technology and the system of finance. Both are cloaked in complex obscurity, some of it deliberately, performatively dull, the kind of technical bafflegab one deploys if one hopes to commit great crimes and make them seem respectable by dismissing one’s critics as unqualified to venture an opinion. What’s more, finance and tech are largely inseparable, with the same shot-callers running both industries, and responding to the same imperatives.


Today, we are faced with a crisis of both finance and tech, thanks to the crisis in public health. Every chapter in this book — from the material on surveillance to that on global, networked soft power — has real bearing on the pandemic world. As economies implode, taking down those few remaining smaller firms with ties to places and people, we are experiencing a quiet wave of consolidations, in which the free-floating Big Tech firms (flush with tax-free, offshore cash) ‘rescue’ these smaller companies and absorb them, barrelling towards a future in which the world can be divided among them like the Great Powers whose peaceful status quo shattered with the Great War.

The Big Tech firms are dividing the world between them




This is an important signal - the battle between platform monopolies and individual enterprises - Apple and Android - digital stores - vs a massive seller of games. This is important because monopolies aren’t just antithetical to a flourishing market - but are dangerous sources of power and control in any democracy.
It’s Epic versus Apple in an antitrust battle … royale.
The company that owns Fortnite is making an in-your-face challenge to Apple: We’re not going to obey the rules you’ve set for your powerful App Store. And we dare you to do something about it.

Now Apple has done something: After Epic Games announced on April 13 that it was encouraging Fortnite players to bypass Apple’s in-house payment system — an intentional violation of Apple’s app policies — Apple removed Fortnite from its App Store, claiming that Epic wanted “a special arrangement” that other developers don’t get.

What that means: If you’ve already downloaded Fortnite to your iPhone or iPad, you can still use it. But the move does mean that Epic won’t be able to update the app — something that it did regularly to fix bugs and introduce new features. So if the situation doesn’t change, Epic will eventually have to abandon Fortnite’s Apple users.

And now Epic, in response to Apple’s response, says it is filing an antitrust lawsuit against Apple in US District Court. It is also telling its Apple users they won’t be able to play future versions of its game: “Because Apple has BLOCKED your ability to update, when Fortnite Chapter 2 - Season 4 releases you will NOT be able to play the new Season on iOS.”


This is a hugely important signal for providing transparent accountability to citizens of the Internet.

We need a full investigation into Siri's secret surveillance campaign

The public deserves to know the extent to which Apple employees have been listening to our private conversations and intimate moments

No one wants their most private activities secretly monitored. That’s why wiretapping is strictly regulated in the US and most of the world. Federal law makes it a crime for the government to surveil communications without a court-ordered warrant. This is not the issue here. Nor is this a case involving one-party consent. Who authorized the makers of Apple’s Siri and their vendors to listen to private conversations in my home? Not me. So why should Apple be allowed to do this? This is what we must find out.


Every tech company with voice-activated computer assistants like Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana and Google Assistant promises to protect privacy. But an ongoing privacy scandal involving Apple’s Siri personal assistant raises fundamental questions about whether these promises can be believed – and cries out for aggressive investigation by regulators on both sides of the Atlantic.



The gold standard in bio-social sciences is aimed at controlling for the effect of the placebo - but we should not dismiss this power when it comes to leveraging all we can to help people find successful health outcomes. However, we should be equally concerned with the corresponding power of the No-cebo (this [sugar] pill will treat your condition but may have xxx side effects …. )

"Placebos are all about 'mind over matter," said Jason Moser, co-author of the study and professor of psychology at MSU. "Nondeceptive placebos were born so that you could possibly use them in routine practice. So rather than prescribing a host of medications to help a patient, you could give them a placebo, tell them it can help them and chances are—if they believe it can, then it will."

Placebos prove powerful even when people know they're taking one

How much of a treatment is mind over matter? It is well documented that people often feel better after taking a treatment without active ingredients simply because they believe it's real—known as the placebo effect.


A team of researchers from Michigan State University, University of Michigan and Dartmouth College is the first to demonstrate that placebos reduce brain markers of emotional distress even when people know they are taking one.


Now, evidence shows that even if people are aware that their treatment is not "real"—known as nondeceptive placebos—believing that it can heal can lead to changes in how the brain reacts to emotional information.


"Just think: What if someone took a side-effect free sugar pill twice a day after going through a short convincing video on the power of placebos and experienced reduced stress as a result?" said Darwin Guevarra, MSU postdoctoral fellow and the study's lead author. "These results raise that possibility."


The new findings, published in the most recent edition of the journal Nature Communications, tested how effective nondeceptive placebos—or, when a person knows they are receiving a placebo—are for reducing emotional brain activity.



This is a fascinating signal - of a possible ‘prophylactic’ against Covid-19 but also of a whole new approach to addressing virus infections.

‘AeroNabs’ Promise Powerful, Inhalable Protection Against COVID-19

Led by UCSF graduate student Michael Schoof, a team of researchers engineered a completely synthetic, production-ready molecule that straitjackets the crucial SARS-CoV-2 machinery that allows the virus to infect our cells. As reported in a new paper, now available on the preprint server bioRxiv, experiments using live virus show that the molecule is among the most potent SARS-CoV-2 antivirals yet discovered.


In an aerosol formulation they tested, dubbed “AeroNabs” by the researchers, these molecules could be self-administered with a nasal spray or inhaler. Used once a day, AeroNabs could provide powerful, reliable protection against SARS-CoV-2 until a vaccine becomes available. The research team is in active discussions with commercial partners to ramp up manufacturing and clinical testing of AeroNabs. If these tests are successful, the scientists aim to make AeroNabs widely available as an inexpensive, over-the-counter medication to prevent and treat COVID-19.


“Far more effective than wearable forms of personal protective equipment, we think of AeroNabs as a molecular form of PPE that could serve as an important stopgap until vaccines provide a more permanent solution to COVID-19,” said AeroNabs co-inventor Peter Walter, PhD, professor of biochemistry and biophysics at UCSF and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. For those who cannot access or don’t respond to SARS-CoV-2 vaccines, Walter added, AeroNabs could be a more permanent line of defense against COVID-19.


“We assembled an incredible group of talented biochemists, cell biologists, virologists and structural biologists to get the project from start to finish in only a few months,” said Schoof, a member of the Walter lab and an AeroNabs co-inventor.



Here is another good signal related to growing antibiotic resistance.

Team develops peptide that makes drug-resistant bacteria sensitive to antibiotics again

Scientists at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) have developed a synthetic peptide that can make multidrug-resistant bacteria sensitive to antibiotics again when used together with traditional antibiotics, offering hope for the prospect of a combination treatment strategy to tackle certain antibiotic-tolerant infections.


On its own, the synthetic antimicrobial peptide can also kill bacteria that have grown resistant to antibiotics.


The NTU Singapore team, led by Associate Professor Kimberly Kline and Professor Mary Chan, developed an antimicrobial peptide known as CSM5-K5 comprising repeated units of chitosan, a sugar found in crustacean shells that bears structural resemblance to the bacterial cell wall, and repeated units of the amino acid lysine.


The scientists believe that chitosan's structural similarity to the bacterial cell wall helps the peptide interact with and embed itself in it, causing defects in the wall and membrane that eventually kill the bacteria.


The team tested the peptide on biofilms, which are slimy coats of bacteria that can cling onto surfaces such as living tissues or medical devices in hospitals, and which are difficult for traditional antibiotics to penetrate.


In both preformed biofilms in the lab and biofilms formed on wounds in mice, the NTU-developed peptide killed at least 90 percent of the bacteria strains in four to five hours.



One more signal in the progress of domesticating DNA - this time related to increasing the capacity of photosynthesis to enhance the growth and yield of plants - although the test plant in this case is tobacco - it could be applied to all many of useful plants.

Having proved the concept in tobacco plants, the scientists, at the University of Essex in Colchester in the UK, hope to further refine the technique and adapt it to crops, targeting soybeans, cowpea and rice. The development could help to ease some of the pressures the world is facing, in the climate crisis and the need to grow food more efficiently.

Gene manipulation using algae could grow more crops with less water

Enhanced photosynthesis holds promise of higher yields in a drought-afflicted future

Tobacco plants have been modified with a protein found in algae to improve their photosynthesis and increase growth, while using less water, in a new advance that could point the way to higher-yielding crops in a drought-afflicted future.


The technique focuses on photosynthesis, the complex process by which plants are able to use sunlight and carbon dioxide to produce nutrients that fuel their growth. Enhancing photosynthesis would produce huge benefits to agricultural productivity, but the complexities of the process have stymied many past attempts to harness it.


In research published in the journal Nature Plants, scientists used genetic manipulation processes to increase an enzyme that already exists within the tobacco plant, introduce a new enzyme from cyanobacteria, and to introduce a protein from algae.


When the plants were modified in this way, their ability to convert light energy efficiently into chemical energy increased significantly. To the surprise of the researchers, the transgenic plants also needed much less water to produce the higher yields.



The way-finding that is mapping the process and progress toward domesticating DNA - has many surprises and serendipities. This sort of signals a capacity to use ‘natural’ combinatorial approaches to enaction new life forms - but the acceleration of our understanding of DNA - proteomics - and more - promises affordances for living systems beyond what we can imagine. This is a very worthy read-think

“It’s like if they had a cow and a giraffe make a baby.” Then he quickly corrected himself, because the lineages of those two ruminants split only a few dozen million years ago. The evolutionary paths of paddlefish and sturgeons diverged 184 million years ago. For those fish to breed is more like “if a human came out of a platypus egg,”

“We never wanted to play around with hybridization,” said Mozsár. “It was just a negative control, which found, somehow, a way to live.”

Extra DNA May Make Unlikely Hybrid Fish Possible

The unintentional creation of “sturddlefish” hybrids may illuminate the genomic mechanisms that govern whether species can interbreed.

Their mothers were Russian sturgeons — large carnivores with creamy bellies, short, rounded snouts, and green, dragonlike scales. Their fathers were American paddlefish — smooth-skinned filter feeders with sensitive, elongated snouts. “Sturddlefish,” as these hybrids have been nicknamed since researchers in Hungary recently announced their creation, go shockingly far beyond classic crossbreeds like mules and ligers, whose parent species sit close together on the tree of life. Sturddlefish result from the merger of different taxonomic families.


Hybrids are often shrugged off as freaky living violations of the rules that keep species distinct. But scientific interest in them has grown with mounting evidence that in nature hybrids can be important both in the emergence of new species and in the conservation of species on the brink of extinction.


Because the new sturddlefish are so radical, they are shaking up scientists’ understanding of what kinds of hybrids may be possible and which species might be most prone to interbreeding successfully. Studies of the new fish could also be poised to provide deep insights into how genomes work more generally.



This is an interesting signal - of how masses of devices can be harnessed with sensors to providing warnings

Android is now the world’s largest earthquake detection network

Google leverages the massive scale of Android to do phone-based earthquake tracking.

Back in 2016, Ars reported on an interesting use for the bundle of sensors we carry around every day in our smartphones—earthquake detection. The accelerometers in your phone make a passable-enough seismometer, and together with location data and enough users, you could detect earthquakes and warn users as the shocks roll across the landscape. The University of California-Berkeley, along with funding from the state of California, built an app called "MyShake" and a cheap, effective earthquake detection network was born, at least, it was born for people who installed the app.

What if you didn't need to install the app? What if earthquake detection was just built in to the operating system? That's the question Google is going to answer, with today's announcement of the "Android Earthquake Alerts System." Google is going to build what it calls "the world’s largest earthquake detection network" by rolling earthquake detection out to nearly every Google Play Android phone. 


This is a good signal of progress in developing unique material/matter for unique purposes - but also it signals emerging viable solutions to eradicating water scarcity.

Highly efficient process makes seawater drinkable in 30 minutes

Access to clean, safe drinking water is a necessity that’s worryingly not being met in many parts of the world. A new study has used a material called a metal-organic framework (MOF) to filter pollutants out of seawater, generating large amounts of fresh water per day while using much less energy than other methods.


MOFs are extremely porous materials with high surface areas – theoretically, if one teaspoon of the stuff was unpacked it could cover a football field. That much surface area makes it great for grabbing hold of molecules and particles.

In this case, the team developed a new type of MOF dubbed PSP-MIL-53, and put it to work trapping salt and impurities in brackish water and seawater. When the material is placed in the water, it selectively pulls ions out of the liquid and holds them on its surface. Within 30 minutes, the MOF was able to reduce the total dissolved solids (TDS) in the water from 2,233 parts per million (ppm) to under 500 ppm. That’s well below the threshold of 600 ppm that the World Health Organization recommends for safe drinking water.

Using this technique, the material was able to produce as much as 139.5 L (36.9 gal) of fresh water per kg of MOF per day. And once the MOF is “full” of particles, it can be quickly and easily cleaned for reuse. To do so, it’s placed in sunlight, which causes it to release the captured salts in as little as four minutes.


This is another important signal of the accelerating progress in phase transitioning global energy geopolitics - there is a growing awareness of a looming of ‘stranded assets’.
Thinktank says changes to forecasts reflect accelerated shift away from fossil fuels

The world’s largest listed oil companies have wiped almost $90bn from the value of their oil and gas assets in the last nine months as the coronavirus pandemic accelerates a global shift away from fossil fuels.


In the last three financial quarters, seven of the largest oil firms have slashed their forecasts for future oil market prices, triggering a wave of downgrades to the value of their oil and gas projects totalling $87bn.


Analysis by the climate finance thinktank Carbon Tracker shows that in the last three month alone, companies including Royal Dutch Shell, BP, Total, Chevron, Repsol, Eni and Equinor have reported downgrades on the value of their assets totalling almost $55bn.


The oil valuation impairments began at the end of last year in response to growing political support for transition from fossil fuels to cleaner energy sources, and they have accelerated as the pandemic has taken its toll on the oil industry.

Thursday, August 13, 2020

Friday Thinking 14 Aug 2020

Friday Thinking is a humble curation of my foraging in the digital environment. Choices are based on my own curiosity and that suggest we are in the midst of a change in the conditions of change - a phase-transition. That tomorrow will be radically unlike yesterday.


Many thanks to those who enjoy this.

In the 21st Century curiosity is what skills the cat -

for life of skillful means .

Jobs are dying - Work is just beginning.

Work that engages our whole self becomes play that works.


The emerging world-of-connected-everything - digital environment - 

computational ecology - 

may still require humans as the consciousness of its own existence. 


To see red - is to know other colors - without the ground of others - there is no figure - differences that make a defference.  


‘There are times, ‘when I catch myself believing there is something which is separate from something else.’


“Be careful what you ‘insta-google-tweet-face’”

Woody Harrelson - Triple 9


Content

Quotes:

Author questions assumptions about smart cities

Can Killing Cookies Save Journalism?

Invisible Manipulators of Your Mind

How the pandemic might play out in 2021 and beyond


Articles:

New York unveils landmark antitrust bill that makes it easier to sue tech giants

Is the US about to split the internet?

Virus hastens newspapers' slide into shaky digital future

Microsoft tests hydrogen fuel cells for backup power at datacenters

EXXON RIPS UP $30-BILLION REBUILDING PLAN, COULD DECLARE STRANDED ASSETS AT KEARL LAKE

Transforming e-waste into a strong, protective coating for metal

3-D touchless interactive display detects finger humidity to change color

Glass-like wood insulates heat, is tough, blocks UV and has wood-grain pattern

New fabric could help keep you cool in the summer, even without A/C

From old jeans to new T-shirt

The New Face of AI: Presagen's Federated Learning algorithm creates higher performing AI than traditional centralized learning

Bacteria in the gut have a direct line to the brain

Water beetles can live on after being eaten and excreted by a frog

For Mates to Fuse Bodies, Some Anglerfish Have Lost Immune Genes


in contrast to smart-from-the-start cities built on green fields or the retrofitted ones we have to date, Halegoua prescribes an alternative model of smart-city development that she dubs the "social city."


"Social-city models are ones that aspire to something other than optimization and efficiency," she said. "Their planners and residents think more critically about the types of places that they're creating when they're implementing digital technologies and who the city and technologies are actually serving, who the smart cities are being built for."


Halegoua urges readers to keep in mind that the retrofitted smart city, anyway, builds upon and thus is "limited and restricted by preexisting inequities."

But with new paradigms, it doesn't have to be that way, 

Author questions assumptions about smart cities



Instead of targeting a certain type of customer, advertisers target customers reading a certain type of article or watching a certain type of show.


This approach, known as contextual advertising, harkens back to the days before microtargeting. Until the last decade, when a company wanted to reach a certain type of reader, it had to buy an ad with a publication whose audience probably included that type. But technology has allowed contextual targeting to become much more precise—to operate on the level of the webpage, as opposed to the publication. Advertisers on NPO can pay to advertise on specific content—the Dutch version of Farmer Wants a Wife is still wildly popular in the Netherlands, it turns out—but can also choose to advertise on one of 23 curated “custom interest channels” based on what a user is reading or watching. (The software scrapes subtitles to tag video). Channels include things like sport and fitness, love and dating, religion and faith, and politics and policy.


In 2019, Ster ran an experiment with 10 different advertisers, including American Express, to compare the performance of ads shown to users who opted in or out of being tracked. On the most important metric, conversions—the share of people who ended up taking the action the advertiser cared about, whether it was adding an item to their cart or signing up for a subscription or credit card—contextual ads did as well or better than microtargeted ones.

Can Killing Cookies Save Journalism?



We are living in an age in which the behavioral sciences have become inescapable. The findings of social psychology and behavioral economics are being employed to determine the news we read, the products we buy, the cultural and intellectual spheres we inhabit, and the human networks, online and in real life, of which we are a part. Aspects of human societies that were formerly guided by habit and tradition, or spontaneity and whim, are now increasingly the intended or unintended consequences of decisions made on the basis of scientific theories of the human mind and human well-being.


The behavioral techniques that are being employed by governments and private corporations do not appeal to our reason; they do not seek to persuade us consciously with information and argument. Rather, these techniques change behavior by appealing to our nonrational motivations, our emotional triggers and unconscious biases. If psychologists could possess a systematic understanding of these nonrational motivations they would have the power to influence the smallest aspects of our lives and the largest aspects of our societies.


….. The deeper concern that Lewis’s happy narrative omits entirely is that behavioral scientists claim to have developed the capacity to manipulate people’s emotional lives in ways that shape their fundamental preferences, values, and desires. In Kahneman’s recent work he has developed the idea, originally set out in one of his papers with Tversky (who died in 1996), that we are not good judges of our own well-being. Our intuitions are unstable and conflicting. We may retrospectively judge an experience more enjoyable than our subjective reports suggested at the time. Kahneman, working with others in the field of positive psychology, has helped to establish a new subfield, hedonic psychology, which measures not just pleasure but well-being in a broader sense, in order to establish a more objective account of our condition than our subjective reflection can afford us.


…. Psychologists at the World Well-Being Project, at the University of Pennsylvania, have collaborated with Michal Kosinski and David Stillwell, computational psychologists from the Psychometrics Centre at the University of Cambridge and developers of myPersonality. This was a Facebook application that allowed users to take psychometric tests and gathered six million test results and four million individual profiles. Scores on these tests could be combined with enormous amounts of data from the user’s Facebook environment. The application has been used in conjunction with personality measures such as the “big five,” also known as the OCEAN model, which purportedly measures openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Words such as “apparently” and “actually,” for example, are taken to correlate with a higher degree of neuroticism. The architects of myPersonality claim that these tests, in conjunction with other data, permit the prediction of individual levels of well-being.


The term “propaganda” has been replaced by “a behavioral approach to persuasive communication with quantifiable results.”

Invisible Manipulators of Your Mind




To end the pandemic, the virus must either be eliminated worldwide — which most scientists agree is near-impossible because of how widespread it has become — or people must build up sufficient immunity through infections or a vaccine. It is estimated that 55–80% of a population must be immune for this to happen, depending on the country

How the pandemic might play out in 2021 and beyond



This is still a weak signal - but a pervasive and popular sentiment pretty much everywhere - the key is electing representatives with courage and independence from corporate funding.

“Our laws on antitrust in New York are a century old and they were built for a completely different economy,” said Gianaris. “Much of the problem today in the 21st century is unilateral action by some of these behemoth tech companies and this bill would allow, for the first time, New York to engage in antitrust enforcement for unilateral action.”

New York unveils landmark antitrust bill that makes it easier to sue tech giants

The legislation comes as a federal panel is investigating the market power of Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Google

New York state is introducing a bill that would make it easier to sue big tech companies for alleged abuses of their monopoly powers.


New York is America’s financial center and one of its most important tech hubs. If successfully passed, the law could serve as a model for future legislation across the country. It also comes as a federal committee is conducting an anti-trust investigation into tech giants amid concerns that their unmatched market power is suppressing competition.


Bill S8700A, now being discussed by New York’s senate consumer protection committee, would update New York’s antiquated antitrust laws for the 21st century, said the bill’s sponsor, Senator Mike Gianaris.


“Their power has grown to dangerous levels and we need to start reining them in,” he said.



We are all getting used to tremendous non-sense from our neighbor to the south - this is perhaps signals an inevitable crisis - of the Internet - remember how poor an intranet is - when compared to the real thing?

Is the US about to split the internet?

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says he wants a "clean" internet.

What he means by that is he wants to remove Chinese influence, and Chinese companies, from the internet in the US.

But critics believe this will bolster a worrying movement towards the breaking up of the global internet.


The so called "splinternet" is generally used when talking about China, and more recently Russia.

The idea is that there's nothing inherent or pre-ordained about the internet being global.


For governments that want to control what people see on the internet, it makes sense to take ownership of it.


The Great Firewall of China is the best example of a nation putting up the internet equivalent of a wall around itself. You won't find a Google search engine or Facebook in China.

What people didn't expect was that the US might follow China's lead.



This signal should be no surprise - all the news fit to print - has been on life support for about a decade at least and COVID-19 may be a final stroke that transforms the newspaper business - into a new form of ‘news’ business.

"Times are hard. There are no advertisers and no-one is reading us," PPI executive director Ariel Sebellino told AFP.

Virus hastens newspapers' slide into shaky digital future

The coronavirus crisis has weighed heavily on print newspapers already battling for survival around the world, with the number of copies sold tumbling while less profitable digital readerships surge.


Simply delivering printed papers to the shops—or having customers come in to buy them—has become a challenge, worsening a years-long decline in sales and advertising revenue.


"Consumption of printed newspapers has fallen as lockdowns undermine physical distribution, almost certainly accelerating the shift to an all-digital future," the Reuters Institute's 2020 annual report said.


Major dailies in Brazil and Mexico have already switched to online-only or dropped some days' editions, while in the Philippines 10 of the 70 newspapers in the PPI association have shuttered.



This is still a weak signal - but indicates the potential of hydrogen as a clean energy to transform how we provide energy storage and power to homes and buildings.

In recent years, hydrogen fuel cell costs have plummeted to the point that they are now an economically viable alternative to diesel-powered backup generators. "And the idea of running them on green hydrogen fits right in with our overall carbon commitments," Monroe said.

Microsoft tests hydrogen fuel cells for backup power at datacenters

In a worldwide first that could jumpstart a clean energy economy built around the most abundant element in the universe, hydrogen fuel cells have powered a row of datacenter servers for 48 consecutive hours, Microsoft announced Monday.


The feat is the latest milestone in the company's commitment to be carbon negative by 2030. To achieve that goal and accelerate the global transition away from fossil fuels, Microsoft is also aiming to eliminate its dependency on diesel fuel by 2030.


Diesel fuel accounts for less than 1% of Microsoft's overall emissions. Its use is primarily confined to Azure datacenters, where, as in most cloud providers around the world, diesel-powered generators support continuous operations in the event of power outages and other service disruptions.


"They are expensive. And they sit around and don't do anything for more than 99% of their life," said Mark Monroe, a principal infrastructure engineer on Microsoft's team for datacenter advanced development.



This is a good signal of passing the point of peak oil demand - like all exponential change - it may still seem to be a crawling rate of change - the next decade - or even by 2025 should make the phase transition in energy geo-politics is upon us.

EXXON RIPS UP $30-BILLION REBUILDING PLAN, COULD DECLARE STRANDED ASSETS AT KEARL LAKE

ExxonMobil’s massive Kearl Lake mine north of Fort McMurray may be the latest tar sands/oil sands to be devalued as one of the world’s most determined colossal fossils considers designating up to one-fifth of its global oil and gas reserves as stranded assets, part of a company-wide scramble to respond to crashing oil prices and weak markets for its product.


On Monday, Bloomberg News reported that Exxon was “ripping up its debt-fueled, US$30 billion-a-year plan to rebuild an aging worldwide portfolio after cash flow evaporated and threatened the company’s vaunted dividend.” Then in a regulatory filing Wednesday, the company admitted that “certain quantities of crude oil, bitumen. and natural gas will not qualify as proved reserves at year-end 2020” if oil prices stay low through the end of the year—as many analysts expect.



Another useful signal about the emergence of a metabolic economy - where every output is designed or captured as an input to other processes-products.

Transforming e-waste into a strong, protective coating for metal

A typical recycling process converts large quantities of items made of a single material into more of the same. However, this approach isn't feasible for old electronic devices, or 'e-waste,' because they contain small amounts of many different materials that cannot be readily separated. Now, in ACS Omega, researchers report a selective, small-scale micro recycling strategy, which they use to convert old printed circuit boards and monitor components into a new type of strong metal coating.


In spite of the difficulty, there's plenty of reason to recycle e-waste: It contains many potentially valuable substances that can be used to modify the performance of other materials or to manufacture new, valuable materials. Previous research has shown that carefully calibrated high temperature-based processing can selectively break and reform chemical bonds in waste to form new, environmentally friendly materials. In this way, researchers have already turned a mix of glass and plastic into valuable, silica-containing ceramics. They've also used this process to recover copper, which is widely used in electronics and elsewhere, from circuit boards. Based on the properties of copper and silica compounds, Veena Sahajwalla and Rumana Hossain suspected that, after extracting them from e-waste, they could combine them to create a durable new hybrid material ideal for protecting metal surfaces.



This is a weak signal but pointing to other stronger signals about the emergence of touchless interfaces all around us - in the digital overlay of our environments.

User-interactive displays (UIDs) facilitate the visualization of invisible information that can be sensed such as touch, smell and sound, with potential applications in wearable and patchable electronics suited for a futuristic hyperconnected society. 

3-D touchless interactive display detects finger humidity to change color

A novel three-dimensional (3-D) touchless interactive display can change color based on the distance of the user's finger from the screen by detecting subtle shifts in ambient relative humidity, according to a new study. The technology may find future applications in wearable electronics and electronic skins (e-skins) that artificially mimic human skin's ability to sense pressure, temperature, and humidity. While scientists have already developed a variety of interactive touch displays, most of these involve variations in the intensity of light emission or chromic reflection in response to a stimulus rather than changes in color, which can provide more striking and distinct visual feedback.


To develop a touchless interactive display based on changes in structural color, Han Sol Kang and colleagues in materials science, nano engineering and chemical engineering in the Republic of Korea and the U.S., designed a new display using chemically cross-linked, interpenetrated hydrogel network layers within photonic crystals that respond to changes in water vapor when a finger is moved from 1 to 15 millimeters from the surface. The process could shift the configuration of its surface structures to produce blue, green and orange colors. The researchers then demonstrated the possibility of easily transferring the photonic crystal-based film from one substrate to another by swapping it from a silicon surface to a printed one-dollar bill. By combining ionic liquid dopants (which alter a semiconductor's electrical properties) as printing inks, the researchers note applications of the technology for printable and rewritable displays.



This signals a transformation of how we build and architect our homes and cities with new materials.

Glass-like wood insulates heat, is tough, blocks UV and has wood-grain pattern

Need light but want privacy? A new type of wood that's transparent, tough, and beautiful could be the solution. This nature-inspired building material allows light to come through (at about 80%) to fill the room but the material itself is naturally hazy (93%), preventing others from seeing inside.


Materials engineers at the University of Maryland have transformed wood into a transparent building material that directs light for a diffused effect, is tougher and insulates better than glass, and has a natural wood-grain pattern. They published their results last week in the journal Nature Communications.


"In this patented research, we demonstrate the first esthetic wood with patterns following the density variation in natural wood. Such patterned, transparent wood can also block UV and heat, is mechanically strong, which could find many applications in buildings where sustainability and energy efficiency are desired," said Liangbing Hu, Herbert Rabin Distinguished Professor and Director of the Center for Materials Innovation at the University of Maryland, College Park.



A useful signal about the progress in ‘hacking matter’ of domesticating nanofabriction. The 3 min video is very informative. To imagine the next 50 years - requires including a significant role in human capacity to continue to enact the environment of human evolution.

New fabric could help keep you cool in the summer, even without A/C

Air conditioning and other space cooling methods account for about 10% of all electricity consumption in the U.S., according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces have developed a material that cools the wearer without using any electricity. The fabric transfers heat, allows moisture to evaporate from the skin and repels water. Watch a video about the new fabric here.


Cooling off a person's body is much more efficient than cooling an entire room or building. Various clothing and textiles have been designed to do just that, but most have disadvantages, such as poor cooling capacity; large electricity consumption; complex, time-consuming manufacturing; and/or high cost. Yang Si, Bin Ding and colleagues wanted to develop a personal cooling fabric that could efficiently transfer heat away from the body, while also being breathable, water repellent and easy to make.



Another small signal - suggesting that a metabolic economy is achievable.

"Cotton clothing is usually incinerated or it ends up in the landfill. Now it can be recycled several times to contribute to greater sustainability in fashion," says Lehmann. This will also broaden the base of raw source materials for pulp production in the textile industry. "The starter material for viscose rayon fibers has been wood-based cellulose. By optimizing the separating processes and intensifying the filtration of foreign fibers in the spinning process, we will eventually be able to establish recycled natural cotton fiber as a serious alternative source of cellulose and base raw material."

From old jeans to new T-shirt

The technical hurdles to recycling clothing made of cotton have been too high in the past, but now a team of researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Polymer Research IAP and a Swedish company have cleared that obstacle. They are the first to produce a viscose filament yarn made of recycled cotton. This fiber can even serve to mass-manufacture textiles.


Producing viscose rayon is a complex process: The pulp is first activated with lye and then chemically derivatized. This yields a very pure alkaline viscose solution. Spinnerets riddled with several thousand 55 ÎĽm diameter holes then spin this solution in an acidic bath. The thousands of liquid jets emerging from the polymeric solution enable the derivatized cellulose to regenerate and continuously precipitate in the spinning bath to form a filament. The next step is to steadily reverse the chemical derivatization, and then wash and dry the filament for it to be wound onto a spool. Made of pure cellulose, this filament is ecofriendly. Rather than adding to the mountains of microplastics that pollute the oceans, it readily decomposes. This is a huge advantage over petroleum-based polyester fibers, which still predominate on the global market with a share of some 60 percent.



A weakish signal related to ongoing progress in learning AI using decentralized data.

"With Decentralized AI Training, the AI travels to the data, trains, and then moves to the next data source. Only the AI, which represents general learnings from the data, is shared, and never the private data themselves. This allows our team to train AI on private patient data that we never see."

The New Face of AI: Presagen's Federated Learning algorithm creates higher performing AI than traditional centralized learning

AI Healthcare company Presagen has developed a novel Federated Learning technique that can create better performing AI than traditional centralized training approaches.


Federated Learning is a technique that allows AI to train on data distributed in different locations throughout the world, without having to move or centralize the data, in order to protect data privacy. Presagen's patent-pending approach, called Decentralized AI Training, has AI traveling to the data rather than data traveling to the AI.



I find it fascinating how we are learning that our sense of self and our wellness and health - is so dependent on our microbiome. The uniqueness of our individual genome-interaction-with-microbiome - makes the progress toward customized diets and health regimes inevitable.

Bacteria in the gut have a direct line to the brain

With its 100 million neurons, the gut has earned a reputation as the body's "second brain"—corresponding with the real brain to manage things like intestinal muscle activity and enzyme secretions. A growing community of scientists are now seeking to understand how gut neurons interact with their brain counterparts, and how failures in this process may lead to disease.


Now, new research shows that gut bacteria play a direct role in these neuronal communications, determining the pace of intestinal motility. The research, conducted in mice and published in Nature, suggests a remarkable degree of communication between our nervous system and the microbiota. It may also have implications for treating gastrointestinal conditions.


"We describe how microbes can regulate a neuronal circuit that starts in the gut, goes to the brain, and comes back to the gut," says Rockefeller's Daniel Mucida, associate professor and head of the Laboratory of Mucosal Immunology. "Some of the neurons within this circuit are associated with irritable bowel syndrome, so it is possible that dysregulation of this circuit predisposes to IBS."



Well this is life passing through life - this seems more like Jim Carrey in Ace Ventura - than a simple ‘excretion’.

Instead of succumbing to the frog’s digestive juices, an eaten Regimbartia attenuata traverses the amphibian’s throat, swims through the stomach, slides along the intestines and climbs out the frog’s butt, alive and well.

Water beetles can live on after being eaten and excreted by a frog

Surviving digestion-by-predator is rare, but not unheard of in the animal kingdom. Some snails survive the trip through fish and birds by sealing their shells and waiting it out. But research published August 3 in Current Biology is the first to document prey actively escaping through the backside of a predator.



Nature always is stranger than fiction - While lobsters have been subsumed to support arguments in favor of hierarchy - this primordial relationship between sexes - hint at chthonic fears of the loss of self. The image is uncanny.

For Mates to Fuse Bodies, Some Anglerfish Have Lost Immune Genes

In most vertebrates, the absence of adaptive immunity would be catastrophic, but in some deep-sea angler fish species, it enables their “wild” and “wacky” mating habits.

 Krøyer’s deep-sea anglerfish, Ceratias holboelli, does not spawn, copulate, or do anything a fish would ordinarily do to mate. Instead, the male—just a few inches long—clasps onto the comparatively gigantic female’s body and never lets go. Slowly, his body morphs into hers, his cells becoming hers, including his testicles, which are used to make offspring. As he vanishes, two individuals become one—taking the concept of monogamy to a new level.