Air-conditioning uses 5% of all the electricity produced in the US Not only are most clothes opaque to visible light, they are also opaque to infrared. This traps infrared radiation, causing the body to heat up. new materials would provide the equivalent of at least 23W of cooling. Crucially these materials should still be opaque at visible wavelengths.
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Plankton evolves eye
A single-celled marine plankton has evolved a miniature version of an eye to help see its prey better. It’s an amazingly complex structure for a single-celled organism to have evolved. It contains a collection of sub-cellular organelles that look very much like the lens, cornea, iris and retina of multicellular eyes found in humans and other larger animals.
23 ka Plant cultivation
Until now, researchers believed farming was “invented” some 12 ka ago in the Cradle of Civilization — Iraq, the Levant, parts of Turkey and Iran. A new discovery offers evidence that trial plant cultivation began far earlier — 23 ka ago.
Onigiri
Finally found a good supplier for Onigiri in NYC: Cafe Zaiya
medieval DRM
Considering these 2 practical theft-prevention techniques – chaining your books to something unmovable or putting them into a safe – the third seems kind of odd: to write a curse against book thieves inside the book. Your typical curse (or anathema) simply stated that the thief would be cursed, like this one in a book from an unidentified Church of St Caecilia: “Whoever takes this book or steals it or in some evil way removes it from the Church of St Caecilia, may he be damned and cursed forever, unless he returns it or atones for his act” (source). Some of these book curses really rub it in: “If anyone should steal it, let him know that on the Day of Judgement the most sainted martyr himself will be the accuser against him before the face of our Lord Jesus Christ”
Ranches the size of small nations
“FOR SALE: Largest ranch in the US within a single fence. Texas fixer-upper with more than 1000 oil wells; 6800 head of cattle; 500 quarter horses; 120 km2 of cropland; tombstones for legendary cowboys, long-dead dogs, and a horse buried standing up. Favorite of Will Rogers and Teddy Roosevelt. Colorful history of drinking and divorce. 15-minute drive to rib-eyes at the Rusty Spur in Vernon. Ideal for Saudi oil sheiks, billionaire hedge funders, and dot-commers who can tell a cow from a steer. Profitable. 0 debt. Property taxes only $800K a year. Price: $725M. Everything you can see, as far as the eye can see, is the ranch”. He points straight ahead, then behind him, then left. “Each horizon is this ranch.”
also, the world’s largest working cattle ranch is on the market. Australia’s remote Anna Creek Station clocks in at 24k km2—more than 12x the size of Waggoner –and its sale package will include 160k head of cattle.
Rapid sea level rise
glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica will melt 10x faster than previous consensus estimates, resulting in sea level rise of at least 3m in as little as 50 years
14 ka Dentistry
dentistry predates alcohol by 5 ka, so this first intervention must have been painful.
Researchers have found the earliest known evidence of dentistry in the molar of a Palaeolithic man who lived 14 ka ago.
Superhuman pictionary
Sketch-a-Net achieved 74.9% recognition versus 73.1% for humans
Perpetual passenger
about a guy who has literally lived in the first class cabin for the last year.
His trip reports betray a theme, in photo after photo entirely devoid of human companionship, empty lounges, first-class menus, embroidered satin pillows — inanimate totems of a 5-star existence. On our next flight, a 7-hour run from Jakarta International to Tokyo, Schlappig tries to get himself motivated about the champagne selection, holding forth on the best meal pairings with a $200 bottle of Krug.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 