Category: Uncategorized

Self-fertilization

hermaphroditic flatworms with needle-tipped male organs inject themselves with sperm in whatever body region is easy to stab.

The lonely end

In aging Japan, 1000s die alone and unnoticed every year. Toru Koremura is there to clean up what they leave behind. 3 months ago in an apartment on the outskirts of Osaka, Japan, Haruki Watanabe died alone. For weeks his body slowly decomposed, slouched in its own fluids and surrounded by fetid, fortnight-old food. He died of self-neglect, solitude, and a suspected heart problem. At 60, Watanabe, wasn’t old, nor was he especially poor. He had no friends, no job, no wife, and no concerned children. His son hadn’t spoken to him in years, nor did he want to again.

Brooklyn Reclaimed

Brooklyn Reclaimed, a place that is built on the idea of keeping with tradition, a collection of artists that included 5Pointz curator Meres One, came to once again give all of us a place where we can see the art form flourish.

US Human Rights Record

this is trolling on the level of the putin editorial in the NYT. it’s effective because they have a point:

in 2014, the US, a self-proclaimed human rights defender, saw no improvements in its existent human rights issues, but reported numerous new problems. While its own human rights situation was increasingly grave, the US violated human rights in other countries in a more brazen manner, and was given more “red cards” in the international human rights field.

F-35 is garbage

the F-35 is demonstrably inferior in a dogfight with the F-16, which the US Air Force first acquired in the late 1970s.

this is what over $1T of crony capitalism gets you: a pile of junk.

Decrypting with radiation

The attack sends a few carefully-crafted ciphertexts, and when these are decrypted by the target computer, they trigger the occurrence of specially-structured values inside the decryption software. These special values cause observable fluctuations in the electromagnetic field surrounding the laptop, in a way that depends on the pattern of key bits. The secret key can be deduced from these fluctuations, through signal processing and cryptanalysis.

!!!

Zoom into the moon

for $600, you can now get a camera that can zoom into the moon until you see individual craters, in full daylight. between hardware advances like this and liquid lenses and computational photography, image taking is changing completely while we’re not looking.

Blood cells for drug delivery

using red blood cells as drug delivery vectors: they lack DNA, have excellent biocompatibility, and blood transfusions are a widely used technique already.

Manual mining of biomedical texts

teaching citizen scientists to precisely identify concepts and concept relationships in biomedical text. This is a task that anyone can learn to do and can perform better than any known computer program. Once these tasks are completed, advanced statistical algorithms take the data provided by the volunteers and use it to provide scientists with new tools for finding the information that they require within the sea of biomedical knowledge.

hopefully this is only a very short term solution as proper machine learning techniques take over. seems useful to bootstrap though.

DOMA repeal

yay for the gay marriage supreme court decision. boo for the 100s of “thinkpieces” about it we’ll have to suffer through over the next few months.