Another Saturday and another week of pure crap for news with the exception of the tragic earthquake in Morocco…..then there is Trump saying something…..some celeb does not wear pants in public…..some overpaid QB gets a bo-bo….
Time for the Old Professor to drop the real news of the week…..
We know that ideas from movies and TV have brought about some amazing technologies…..even the Terminator has spurred the discoveries onward….
A pair of researchers have created a living skin made of fungus, directly inspired by the 1984 film “The Terminator.”
The goal is to develop a coating that could act as a biodegradable and multifunctional sensor for electronics, as New Scientist reports. Conventional electronic sensors made of silicone tend to be difficult to manufacture and often are limited in how many things they can detect at once.
“There’s this scene in ‘The Terminator’ in which they implant the skin on the robot,” Antoni Gandia at the Polytechnic University of Valencia in Spain, co-author of a recent paper, which is currently under review, told New Scientist.
“The skin is external to him, yet it reports data to the robot and auto-repairs,” he added. “We wanted to show that we can already do things like that.”
https://futurism.com/the-byte/living-skin-robot-fungus
In recent years the radical right has been busy in the states banning books….I would post a list but do not have enough room on IST for the list (it is that big)….
Many organizations track book bans across the country. Among the most extensive coverage is that of PEN America, a nonprofit dedicated to “uniting writers and their allies to celebrate creative expression and defend the liberties that make it possible.”
Reproduced here, the PEN list covers books that were banned or challenged during the first half of the 2022 school year—the most recent data available. Some of these titles have since been reinstated; others have disappeared from shelves altogether.
As many people have noted, the past school year has seen an uptick in banning works by and about Black people and queer people specifically. Fences, a classic of African-American theater, is on this list, as are Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter From a Birmingham Jail and children’s picture books about Black joy. Some states have chosen to ban any written materials relating to visual art—Missouri’s list includes guides to Impressionist and modern painters as well as Babylonian and African art.
Whichever artistic tradition is targeted, students—and our future culture—suffer.
You can see the full list of banned titles below, or click on your state to see which books are banned. You can also purchase nearly every title here, through Bookshop.org and Better World Books.
Or click on this link and see what books your state has banned….
https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/a45012950/banned-book-list/
Did you know that the ‘Middle Ages’ never happened?
We’re currently living in the year 1725, not 2023. At least, that’s what adherents of the Phantom Time Hypothesis would have you believe. First put forward in 1991 by the German historian Heribert Illig and popularized by his sensational book The Invented Middle Ages: The Greatest Time Fake in History (Das erfundene Mittelalter: Die grösste Zeitfälschung der Geschichte in German), this historical conspiracy theory alleges that the years spanning 614 to 911 CE never actually happened, but were fabricated by powerful members of the medieval elite: Pope Sylvester II and Holy Roman Emperor Otto III.
Illig’s story goes like this: Sylvester and Otto, possibly in conjunction with the Byzantine Emperor Constantine VII, altered the medieval European calendar to align their respective reigns with the year 1000 CE, exactly one millennium after the birth of Jesus Christ, a significant date in a Christian society. Illig also claims the trio forged historical documentation to account for the “phantom” centuries, inventing everything from the Muslim conquest of Spain to the life of the post-Roman ruler Charlemagne. As support for his theory, Illig cited a suspicious lack of original historical documents from the early Middle Ages, as well as discrepancies between the Julian and Gregorian calendars, which he believes do not add up.
https://www.mentalfloss.com/posts/phantom-time-hypothesis-conspiracy-theory
Why not? We that the ‘Flat Earthers’, the ‘Hollow Earthers’ this is just a steady progression of conspiracies….
Since the massive earthquake in Morocco that killed over 3000 people there is a renewed interest in a simple technology for house construction….
Plastic is, without a doubt, one of the biggest banes of the environment. Plastic production has skyrocketed since the 1950s and it’s nonbiodegradable, which means it simply doesn’t decompose. The dumping of plastic has become one of the biggest environmental issues, but Nigeria is showing the world an amazing way to repurpose plastic for a better future. Nigerian companies are now using plastic bottles to build homes that can withstand powerful earthquakes and even bullets. The technology is called the “bottle trick.” The first house to be built using recycled plastic bottles was in the village of Yelwa. The house has turned into a tourist attraction with even government officials and traditional leaders paying a visit to see the marvel. The eco-friendly home was built with nothing but plastic bottles, sand and mud, reported Power of Positivity.
The bottles are filled with sand and the bottom of the bottle is kept facing outside, giving a unique look to the wall. They are used as “bricks” and laid on top of each other and held together by mud. While houses in most places around the world are traditionally built in a square shape, it’s common for homes in Nigeria to be built in a circular fashion. The homes using the “bottle trick” method are also built circularly, keeping them in style with the other homes in the region. While the homes are beautifully designed, the idea is to preserve the environment by repurposing plastic. The homes being built usually come with a bedroom, living room, bathroom, toilet, and kitchen. Each structure is believed to require at least 7,800 plastic bottles. Companies have already built 25 structures using plastic bottles and they’re expected to become very popular among the environmentally conscious. The companies said they first lay a concrete foundation, before building walls using plastic bottles and sand.
A helluva idea! Repurpose plastic bottles could work in may ways other than being just earthquake proof.
finally the Ig Noble Awards…..the award for the most humorous scientific endeavors…
Counting nose hairs in cadavers, repurposing dead spiders, and explaining why scientists lick rocks are among the winning achievements in this year’s Ig Nobels, the prize for humorous scientific feats, organizers announced Thursday. The 33rd annual prize ceremony was a prerecorded online event, as it has been since the pandemic, instead of the past live ceremonies at Harvard University. Ten spoof prizes were awarded to the teams and individuals around the globe.
- Among the winners was Jan Zalasiewicz of Poland who earned the chemistry and geology prize for explaining why many scientists like to lick rocks, the AP reports. “Wetting the surface allows fossil and mineral textures to stand out sharply, rather than being lost in the blur of intersecting micro-reflections and micro-refractions that come out of a dry surface,” Zalasiewicz wrote in the Palaeontological Association newsletter in 2017.
- A team of scientists from India, China, Malaysia, and the United States took the mechanical engineering prize for its study of repurposing dead spiders to be used in gripping tools in robotics. They created a gripper in an approach they called “necrobotics.” “Furthermore, the gripper can serve as a handheld device and innately camouflages in outdoor environments,” they wrote in their research.
- The nutrition prize was won by Japanese researchers Homei Miyashita Hiromi Nakamura, who studied electrified chopsticks and drinking straws, the Guardian reports. “The taste of food can be changed immediately and reversibly by electrical stimulation, and this is something that has been difficult to achieve with conventional ingredients such as seasonings,” said Nakamura.
The medicine prize went to a team that counted the nose hairs in 20 cadavers at a medical school in California to determine whether there was an equal number in each nostril. “Our intention to describe human nose hair growth patterns may seem unusual, but it originated from a need to better understand the role they play as front line guardians of the respiratory system,” researcher Christine Pham tells Cosmos. They found that the average number of nose hairs in the right nostril is 122, two more than in the left nostril.
Other winning teams were lauded for studying the impact of teacher boredom on student boredom; the affect of anchovies’ sexual activity on ocean water mixing; and ” the sensations people feel when they repeat a single word many, many, many, many, many, many, many times ,” according to the organizers
Congrats to the winners…..
There is my dump for this Saturday.
Enjoy your day and your weekend….and as always….Be Well and Be Safe….
I Read, I Write, You Know
“lego ergo scribo”
In Saner Thought 