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Category: Technology

The smaller bombs that could turn Ukraine into a nuclear war zone

The smaller bombs that could turn Ukraine into a nuclear war zone

The New York Times reports: In destructive power, the behemoths of the Cold War dwarfed the American atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Washington’s biggest test blast was 1,000 times as large. Moscow’s was 3,000 times. On both sides, the idea was to deter strikes with threats of vast retaliation — with mutual assured destruction, or MAD. The psychological bar was so high that nuclear strikes came to be seen as unthinkable. Today, both Russia and the United States have nuclear…

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A large solar storm could knock out the power grid and the internet – an electrical engineer explains how

A large solar storm could knock out the power grid and the internet – an electrical engineer explains how

Typical amounts of solar particles hitting the earth’s magnetosphere can be beautiful, but too much could be catastrophic. Svein-Magne Tunli – tunliweb.no/Wikimedia, CC BY-NC-SA By David Wallace, Mississippi State University On Sept. 1 and 2, 1859, telegraph systems around the world failed catastrophically. The operators of the telegraphs reported receiving electrical shocks, telegraph paper catching fire, and being able to operate equipment with batteries disconnected. During the evenings, the aurora borealis, more commonly known as the northern lights, could be…

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New cyber tool circumvents censorship sending texts to Russians about the war in Ukraine

New cyber tool circumvents censorship sending texts to Russians about the war in Ukraine

The Wall Street Journal reports: People around the world are using a new website to circumvent the Kremlin’s propaganda machine by sending individual messages about the war in Ukraine to random people in Russia. The website was developed by a group of Polish programmers who obtained some 20 million cellphone numbers and close to 140 million email addresses owned by Russian individuals and companies. The site randomly generates numbers and addresses from those databases and allows anyone anywhere in the…

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Russian troops fought for control of a nuclear power plant in Ukraine – a safety expert explains how warfare and nuclear power are a volatile combination

Russian troops fought for control of a nuclear power plant in Ukraine – a safety expert explains how warfare and nuclear power are a volatile combination

Rafael Mariano Grossi, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, points to the training facility hit by Russian artillery at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. AP Photo/Lisa Leutner By Najmedin Meshkati, University of Southern California Russian forces have taken control of Europe’s largest nuclear power plant after shelling the Zaporizhzhia facility in the Ukrainian city of Enerhodar. The overnight assault caused a blaze at the facility, prompting fears over the safety of the plant and evoking painful memories in…

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The rise of Big Tech may just be starting

The rise of Big Tech may just be starting

Farhad Manjoo writes: The stock market has lately soured on the technology industry. Stock prices of many of the largest companies are down this year, some slightly — shares of Apple and Google have fallen more than 6 percent — and some stupendously: Facebook’s parent company, Meta, and Netflix have lost about a third of their value since the New Year. Because surging tech stocks drove a big part of the stock market’s rise in 2021, their decline has contributed…

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The staggering ecological impacts of computation and the Cloud

The staggering ecological impacts of computation and the Cloud

Steven Gonzalez Monserrate writes: Screens brighten with the flow of words. Perhaps they are emails, hastily scrawled on smart devices, or emoji-laden messages exchanged between friends or families. On this same river of the digital, millions flock to binge their favorite television programming, to stream pornography, or enter the sprawling worlds of massively multiplayer online roleplaying games, or simply to look up the meaning of an obscure word or the location of the nearest COVID-19 testing center. Whatever your query,…

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Pharmaceutical drugs have dangerously polluted the world’s rivers, scientists warn

Pharmaceutical drugs have dangerously polluted the world’s rivers, scientists warn

The Guardian reports: Humanity’s drugs have polluted rivers across the entire world and pose “a global threat to environmental and human health”, according to the most comprehensive study to date. Pharmaceuticals and other biologically active compounds used by humans are known to harm wildlife and antibiotics in the environment drive up the risk of resistance to the drugs, one of the greatest threats to humanity. The scientists measured the concentration of 61 active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) at more than 1,000…

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Experiment demonstrates that nuclear fussion is no longer a pipedream solution for the climate crisis

Experiment demonstrates that nuclear fussion is no longer a pipedream solution for the climate crisis

CNN reports: There’s no silver bullet to the climate crisis, but nuclear fusion may be the closest thing to it. In the quest for a near-limitless, zero-carbon source of reliable power, scientists have generated fusion energy before, but they have struggled for decades to sustain it for very long. On Wednesday, however, scientists working in the United Kingdom announced that they more than doubled the previous record for generating and sustaining nuclear fusion, which is the same process that allows…

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Applying machine learning to cosmology

Applying machine learning to cosmology

Charlie Wood writes: A group of scientists may have stumbled upon a radical new way to do cosmology. Cosmologists usually determine the composition of the universe by observing as much of it as possible. But these researchers have found that a machine learning algorithm can scrutinize a single simulated galaxy and predict the overall makeup of the digital universe in which it exists — a feat analogous to analyzing a random grain of sand under a microscope and working out…

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I’m not sorry for my delay

I’m not sorry for my delay

Joe Pinsker writes: At first, being reachable all the time felt good. To professionals who started using BlackBerries 20 years ago to conduct business on the go, it registered as a superpower. “They felt like masters of the universe,” Melissa Mazmanian, an informatics professor at UC Irvine who studied the devices’ uptake in the early 2000s, told me. But as more people got mobile devices, responding to messages anytime became the norm among co-workers as well as friends and loved…

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The worrisome rise of Non-Fungible Tokens

The worrisome rise of Non-Fungible Tokens

Caleb Scharf writes: Humans are very good at inventing commodities, and we’ve been at it for a long time. See that pebble over there? Well, that’s a better pebble than all these others, and if you give me something in exchange for it, I’ll let you take ownership. It’ll be your pebble, forever. And soon there will be a market in pebbles, a pebble community, pebble exhibitions and auctions filled with pebble speculators, pebble exchanges, and pebble artists. The deeper,…

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Are we witnessing the dawn of post-theory science?

Are we witnessing the dawn of post-theory science?

Laura Spinney writes: Isaac Newton apocryphally discovered his second law – the one about gravity – after an apple fell on his head. Much experimentation and data analysis later, he realised there was a fundamental relationship between force, mass and acceleration. He formulated a theory to describe that relationship – one that could be expressed as an equation, F=ma – and used it to predict the behaviour of objects other than apples. His predictions turned out to be right (if…

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Waste is central, not peripheral, to everything we design, make and do

Waste is central, not peripheral, to everything we design, make and do

Justin McGuirk writes: The opposition between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ is problematic for many reasons, but there’s one that we rarely discuss. The ‘nature vs culture’ dualism leaves out an entire domain that properly belongs to neither: the world of waste. The mountains of waste that we produce every year, the torrents of polluting effluent, the billions of tonnes of greenhouse gases, the new cosmos of microplastics expanding through our oceans – none of this has ever been entered into the…

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China harvests masses of data on Western targets, documents show

China harvests masses of data on Western targets, documents show

The Washington Post reports: China is turning a major part of its internal Internet data surveillance network outward, mining Western social media, including Facebook and Twitter, to equip its government agencies, military and police with information on foreign targets, according to a Washington Post review of hundreds of Chinese bidding documents, contracts and company filings. China maintains a countrywide network of government data surveillance services — called public opinion analysis software — that were developed over the past decade and…

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How a handful of prehistoric geniuses launched humanity’s technological revolution

How a handful of prehistoric geniuses launched humanity’s technological revolution

Clovis spearheads. wikimedia, CC BY-SA By Nicholas R. Longrich, University of Bath For the first few million years of human evolution, technologies changed slowly. Some three million years ago, our ancestors were making chipped stone flakes and crude choppers. Two million years ago, hand-axes. A million years ago, primitive humans sometimes used fire, but with difficulty. Then, 500,000 years ago, technological change accelerated, as spearpoints, firemaking, axes, beads and bows appeared. This technological revolution wasn’t the work of one people….

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Churches target new members, with help from Big Data

Churches target new members, with help from Big Data

The Wall Street Journal reports: Struggling with grief? Too much debt? On the verge of divorce? Churches are ready to deliver a digital intervention, with help from Big Data. A small company called Gloo has put itself at the forefront of an effort to analyze Americans’ personal data and online activities to help churches reach people most likely to be open to their messages and join their congregations. The more surgical method of evangelization borrows techniques long used by businesses…

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