Kenya's push to make 'boda-boda' motorbike taxis go electric
"The government wants Kenya's three million motorbike taxi riders to go green but only a few have done so." I last went to Kenya over 10 years ago and I got around Kitale on the back of push bikes by local riders. Motorised bikes 'boda-boda' were only just being introduced at the time. Apparently there...
Source: bbc.com
Microsoft Cloud AI Accelerates Search for New Battery Materials
Extremetech report that "Microsoft and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory used AI to narrow a list of 32 million candidate materials down to 18 in hours instead of years."
Source: extremetech.com
The Internet Is About to Get Weird Again
The internet seems ripe for change, and millions of people seem poised to connect in new ways, as they reconsider their relationship to technology.
Source: rollingstone.com
Gender differences in individual variation in academic grades fail to fit expected patterns for STEM - Nature Communications
Fewer women than men pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), despite girls outperforming boys at school in the relevant subjects. According to the ‘variability hypothesis’, this over-representation of males is driven by gender differences in variance; greater male...
Source: nature.com
FDA approves most expensive drug ever, a $3.5 million-per-dose gene therapy for hemophilia B
The single-dose medicine "represents important progress" as the first-ever gene therapy for the rare disorder, the FDA said. ”The Food and Drug Administration cleared Hemgenix, an IV treatment for adults with hemophilia B, the less common form of the genetic disorder which primarily affects men.”
Source: cbsnews.com
Rogers network resuming after major outage hits millions of Canadians
Rogers Telecommunications said its network was beginning to recover late on Friday after a 19-hourservice outage at one of Canada's biggest telecom operators shut banking, transport and government access for millions, drawing outrage from customers and adding to criticism over its industry dominance.
Source: reuters.com
Polygenic prediction of educational attainment within and between families from genome-wide association analyses in 3 million
We conduct a genome-wide association study (GWAS) of educational attainment (EA) in a sample of ~3 million individuals and identify 3,952 approximately uncorrelated genome-wide-significant single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). A genome-wide polygenic predictor, or polygenic index (PGI), explains 12–16%...
Source: nature.com
The Bluestocking: The Ant Mill
The Ant Mill theory of Discourse. "An orphan take is an opinion expressed in backlash to a marginal, nebulous or anticipated opposing view. If you see angry tweets or opeds about the horror of a viewpoint you’ve never seen expressed in the wild, that’s an orphan take."
Source: substack.com
Rocking down to Electric Avenue? Good luck charging your car
European and U.S. cities planning to phase out combustion engines over the next 15 years first need to plug a charging gap for millions of residents who park their cars on the street.
Source: reuters.com
New WHO Global Air Quality Guidelines aim to save millions of lives from air pollution
"Air pollution is one of the biggest environmental threats to human health, alongside climate change. New guidelines provide clear evidence of the damage air pollution inflicts on human health, at even lower concentrations than previously understood." "Global assessments of ambient air pollution alone...
Source: who.int
Britain tells its food industry to prepare for CO2 price shock
"Britain warned its food producers on Wednesday to prepare for a 400% rise in carbon dioxide prices after extending emergency state support to avert a shortage of poultry and meat triggered by soaring costs of wholesale natural gas." State support has been given to a key producer for a period of 3 weeks.
Source: reuters.com
New Delta strain believed to have emerged among 53,000 revellers at Boardmasters festival
Almost 5,000 infections have been linked to the Boardmasters festival in Cornwall, and with half a million music lovers at even larger events over the Bank Holiday, officials fear revellers are being hit by a new strain of the Delta variant
Source: inews.co.uk
Clinically contextualised ECG interpretation: the impact of prior clinical exposure and case vignettes on ECG diagnostic
Does teaching ECGs with a clinical vignette improve training? Not greatly ... but having seen a condition previously (and presumably the ECG that went with it) is probably best. The researchers concluded that "ECG training should therefore not rely on experiential learning
alone, but instead be supplemented...
Source: biomedcentral.com
Sewage discharged into rivers 400,000 times in 2020
Waterways in England had sewage discharged into them for three million hours
Source: bbc.com
Israel Reveals Newly Discovered Fragments of Dead Sea Scrolls
The finds, ranging from just a few millimeters to a thumbnail in size, are the first to be unearthed in archaeological excavations in the Judean Desert in about 60 years.
Source: nytimes.com
Data-driven humanitarianism
An article from MIT Technology Review showing how the World Food
Programme uses geospatial data that is developed and made 'open' to all
by people within the areas being served. "It’s one of the most beautiful places on Earth, but its people are among the most vulnerable. Afghanistan’s snowy...
Source: technologyreview.com
The Namib Desert bears a scar from a meteorite impact.
"In the vastness of one of the world’s oldest deserts lies a relatively recent geologic feature: the Roter Kamm crater (“red comb” or “red crest/ridge” in German). An astronaut onboard the International Space Station photographed the crater while orbiting over the Namib Desert. It is approximately...
Source: nasa.gov
Rocket Report Cornwall
Cornwall says “LOL, no” to space tourism. "If we're being blunt about it ... One council member, John Fitter, was more explicit, saying, 'If we were to entertain this, it would be quite ridiculous and send out the wrong message to those people in Cornwall who could possibly be suffering on below...
Source: arstechnica.com
Dreadful user experience can be expensive.
"Citibank just got a $500 million lesson in the importance of UI design: Citibank was trying to make $7.8M in interest payments. It sent $900M instead." The screenshot is from court records where the judge ruled against Citibank who had wanted to get their money back. The lesson is to always include...
Source: arstechnica.com
No, frozen wind turbines aren't the main culprit for Texas' power outages
"Lost wind power makes up only a fraction of the reduction in power generating capacity that has brought outages to millions of Texans across the state during a major winter storm." Plenty of disinformation out there. There have been posts apparently showing a helicopter de-icing a wind turbine but it...
Source: texastribune.org
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