’News continues to worsen for marine mammals on the west coast. In addition to terrible domoic acid poisoning for seals and sea lions, whales are passing away at a record rate.…’

Via Boing Boing

Books by authors like Neil Gaiman and Gabriel García Márquez have been dismissed as too difficult to adapt. With Netflix offering both time and cash, is that true anymore?:

’It’s remarkable how many “unfilmable” books have been, well, filmed. With this week’s news that Neil Gaiman’s sprawling comic-book series The Sandman has been acquired by Netflix, fans have been excited, if tentative, no doubt remembering the long history of attempts to adapt the 75-issue story that was often dismissed as too difficult to get on screen.

As Gaiman once said: “I’d rather see no Sandman movie made than a bad Sandman movie.” Multiple scripts were written throughout the 1990s, there was a TV show in 2010, a film in 2013, an attempted rewrite of that film in 2016 – but none of this means that Netflix’s latest literary project is doomed to fail.

For “unfilmable” is often just code for “we tried and it didn’t happen”, an excuse for all the films trapped in development hell, such as John Milton’s Paradise Lost (Bradley Cooper was once lined up to play a hunky Lucifer), and the long-awaited adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. “Unfilmable” can also mean “we tried and did a terrible job”. Stephen King’s Dark Tower series is not unfilmable, but the 2017 take starring Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey might make you wish it was. Or the maddening works of William Faulkner, most recently put on screen by actor James Franco, who took time off from insisting he can write novels to ruin someone else’s by directing, adapting and starring in As I Lay Dying in 2013 and The Sound and the Fury in 2015. Or Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged: three films and three terrible decisions came in 2016 when reviews for part one (“sits there flapping on screen like a bludgeoned seal” declared Rolling Stone) did nothing to dissuade the great minds behind it, who turned their backs on the free-market to supply two sequels in the face of no demand. (Part two: “The film’s excruciating unwatchability transcends politics”; part three: “Cut-rate to the point of incoherence.”) And unfilmable can even apply to books that prove to be brilliant on camera: the new TV show of Joseph Heller’s Catch–22, the Wachowski sisters’ take on David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2015 film of Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice.…’

Via The Guardian

’Scientists in Florida have detected the largest seaweed bloom in the world. Extending from the Gulf of Mexico to the African coast, the unusually large bloom is threatening marine life and coastal regions, with the researchers warning it’s likely a sign of things to come.

New research published today in Science describes the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt (GASB)—the largest single expanse of macroalgae in the world. The enormous belt of seaweed is composed of floating, photosynthetic brown algae, called Sargassum. The authors of the new study, led by Chuanmin Hu from the College of Marine Science at the University of South Florida, attributed the unusually large bloom to both human-causes and natural processes, saying such “recurrent blooms may become the new normal.”…’

Via Gizmodo

’Researchers at the Center for Quantum Nanoscience (QNS) within the Institute for Basic Science (IBS) at Ewha Womans University have made a major scientific breakthrough by performing the world’s smallest magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). In an international collaboration with colleagues from the U.S., QNS scientists used their new technique to visualize the magnetic field of single atoms.…’

Via Phys.org

Pictures of Other Dictators and Their Boy Toy Tanks:

Via The New York Review of Books

Here’s a better idea:

’We’ve seen it happen too many times. A person calls 911 to report a disturbance next door or out in the street. The police show up. Things go awry and the police shoot the person at the center of the disturbance — and it turns out that the person had a mental health issue.

According to the Treatment Advocacy Center, a Virginia-based nonprofit working to improve access to mental health treatment, at least one in four people killed by the police in the US has a serious mental health problem. Stories of these police killings have been in the headlines over the past few months, with anguished family members decrying officers’ violence toward their loved ones.

There’s got to be a better way to handle 911 calls.

Some people say there is: Instead of sending police to deal with non-criminal emergencies, why not send mental health experts?…’

Via Vox

Via 3 Quarks Daily

Tam Hunt, UC Santa Barbara:

’How can you know that any animal, other human beings, or anything that seems conscious, isn’t just faking it? Does it enjoy an internal subjective experience, complete with sensations and emotions like hunger, joy, or sadness? After all, the only consciousness you can know with certainty is your own. Everything else is inference. The nature of consciousness makes it by necessity a wholly private affair.

These questions are more than philosophical. As intelligent digital assistants, self-driving cars and other robots start to proliferate, are these AIs actually conscious or just seem like it? Or what about patients in comas – how can doctors know with any certainty what kind of consciousness is or is not present, and prescribe treatment accordingly?

In my work, often with with psychologist Jonathan Schooler at the University of California, Santa Barbara, we’re developing a framework for thinking about the many different ways to possibly test for the presence of consciousness.…’

Via The Conversation

’Whether or not fish feel pain has been debated for years. But the balance of evidence says yes. Now the question is, what do we do about it?…’

Via Smithsonian

’Physicist Eugene Paul Wigner predicted more than 80 years ago that hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe, could turn into an electricity-conducting solid metal at the right temperature and pressure. Scientists have spent decades since attempting to synthesize this material—and may have finally done so.

A team of researchers in France has posted a paper on the arXiv physics preprint server describing their observation of metallic hydrogen under pressures greater than those inside Earth’s core. Several times, other researchers have claimed to discover this phase of matter, claims that are generally met with varying levels of skepticism. But some experts think that this newest claim could be the real deal.

Metallic hydrogen is exactly what it sounds like—a state of the element hydrogen where it has the properties of a metal. The substance should “indisputably” exist, according to the new paper, thanks to something called quantum confinement: restrict electrons’ motion enough, and the electronic and optical properties of the material change thanks to the rules of quantum mechanics. At high enough pressures, any insulator should become a conductive metal, according to the paper; oxygen becomes a metal at 100 GPa, around a million times the pressure of Earth’s air at sea level, for example.

The discovery of metallic hydrogen would be exciting for a few reasons. Of course, it would prove experimentally that the material existed. It might transmit electricity without heating up, meaning it would be a superconductor, perhaps even a room-temperature superconductor. That’s another long-sought goal of physicists and could revolutionize electronics. Further, such a metal might fill the centers of massive planets like Jupiter, so being able to create it here on Earth could help us learn more about those planets.…’

Via Gizmodo

’It happens unexpectedly: a person long thought lost to the ravages of dementia, unable to recall the events of their lives or even recognize those closest to them, will suddenly wake up and exhibit surprisingly normal behavior, only to pass away shortly thereafter. This phenomenon, which experts refer to as terminal or paradoxical lucidity, has been reported since antiquity, yet there have been very few scientific studies of it. That may be about to change.

In an article published in the August issue of Alzheimer’s & Dementia, an interdisciplinary workgroup convened by the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) National Institute on Aging and led by Michigan Medicine’s George A. Mashour, M.D., Ph.D., outlines what is known and unknown about paradoxical lucidity, considers its potential mechanisms, and details how a thorough scientific analysis could help shed light on the pathophysiology of dementia.…’

Via Neuroscience News

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’The ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are remnants of the ice age. They’re also the wild cards of climate science.…’

Via Big Think

‘A tentative Supreme Court term ends. Liberals should brace themselves for the next one.…’

Via Vox

’Predictive Processing and the Nature of Conscious Experience A Conversation with Andy Clark…’

Via Edge.org

’Over the course of his career, former FBI agent and behavioral analyst John E. Douglas has interviewed criminals ranging from repeated hijacker Garrett Trapnell and cult leader Charles Manson to serial killers Edmund Kemper (a.k.a. the Co-Ed Killer) and Dennis Rader (a.k.a. B.T.K.). In his new book, The Killer Across the Table, Douglas takes readers into the room as he interviews four very different offenders.…’

Via Mental Floss

’In the bizarre world of vanishings and people who have seemingly ceased to exist there is the phenomenon of whole groups of people or towns that have just sort of evaporated out of existence with no real known reason. To think that a whole population of people could just disappear without a trace is a sobering thought, leading to much speculation on what could possible be at the root of such mass vanishings, and it is a topic I have covered here before. One very curious such account that has popped up in recent times has to do with a rural village in a remote area of China, which supposedly just blinked out of existence one day to leave stories of strangeness and conspiracies in its wake.

Located in a region of Central China is the province of Shaanxi, which stretches over 79,151 sq mi and encompasses the majestic Wei Valley, the Loess Plateau, the Ordos Desert, and the Qinling Mountains. Here there once supposedly stood a rural village much like many others like it that dot the region, with nothing particularly out of the ordinary or exceptional about it other than its proximity to a rocket launch center, but it would suddenly begin making the Chinese news and generating buzz on social media in 2010 when the story came out about how this little village one day just completely vanished off the face of the earth.

According to numerous reports taken from Chinese media, in 1987 it was found that the village had been completely abandoned overnight. There was apparently not a soul remaining of the estimated population of 1,000, and every single man, woman, child, and even all of the town’s livestock and pets were simply gone without a trace. Apparently there were no signs of how they had even gotten out of there, and the homes all seemed as if they had been very rapidly vacated, with meals set out and belongings left behind. All very mysterious and spooky indeed, but it would apparently get even weirder still.…’

Via Mysterious Universe

’“He lost the election, and he was put into office because the Russians interfered on his behalf.”…’

Via Vox

’The American Civil Liberties Union released internal NSA memos received under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit revealing that, once again, the NSA improperly collected phone call and text message metadata of US citizens.

A spokesperson for the agency was quick to pin the blame on the telecommunications companies that provided the information:

“While NSA lawfully sought data pertaining to a foreign power engaged in international terrorism, the provider produced inaccurate data and data beyond which NSA sought,” NSA’s media relations chief Greg Julian told The Wall Street Journal.

In other words, “We didn’t want the data we took, and anyway, we were busy catching TERRISTS.…’

Via Boing Boing

’The field that once held hundreds of thousands of scantily clad, mud-soaked spectators is now a verdant meadow intersected by old wooden fences and a parking lot. Some spots have been overtaken by thick vegetation and trees, obscuring important landmarks. The Woodstock site became a protected area in 2017 when it was added to the National Register of Historic Places, but with nature taking its course, the site is beginning to show the passage of time—and by consequence, is attracting the interest of conservationists and archaeologists.…’

Via Gizmodo

’Astronauts aboard the International Space Station caught the spectacular eruption of the Raikoke volcano off of Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula over the weekend.

It’s a pretty amazing view. Here’s the entire image:

The image shows the classic shape of a volcanic plume rising, and then ash spreading at the top. It’s surrounded by a ring of white clouds, likely either water vapor condensing out of the air or steam from magma entering the water, Simon Carn, a volcanologist at Michigan Tech, said in a NASA Earth Observatory post. Aircraft and satellite data show that the ash could have reached altitudes of 8 to 10 miles.…’

Via Gizmodo

’Scientists spotted an elusive giant squid in its deep-ocean habitat in American waters for the first time. These titanic, whale-battling beasts are rarely seen, so this sighting is a thrill for biologists and regular folk alike.

Giant squids are 30- to 43-foot cephalopods that inhabit the ocean at depths of 980 to 3,280 feet, where pressures are high and very little sunlight penetrates. Plenty of other strange beasts inhabit this realm, but the giant squid has long been the subject of myth, given its enormous size and the fact that dead ones occasionally wash up on shore.

The squid is not often seen alive in its natural habitat. Scientist Edie Widder, founder of the Ocean Research and Conservation Association (ORCA), developed the camera that first filmed a giant squid near Japan’s Ogasawara archipelago in 2013. Last week, on an expedition in the Gulf of Mexico 100 miles south of New Orleans, scientist Nathan Robinson was watching footage taken by Widder’s Medusa system when a giant squid came along and attacked the camera’s fake jellyfish (actually a ring of lights), according to a NOAA field log. It was their fifth attempt to use the Medusa system to attempt to spot the beast in those waters.…’

Via Gizmodo

’Many of us are feeling some combination of despair, outrage, and shock at reports of the conditions at the U.S. southern border. It’s devastating to learn that our government is separating children from their families, cramming people into overcrowded detention cells, and preventing refugees from accessing basic necessities like food, soap, and clean clothing. If you’re asking yourself what you can do to protest the inhumane treatment of individuals and families seeking asylum in the United States, here are some actions you can take right now.…’

Via Lifehacker

Actually, in many historical instances, it may not have been so bad for the masses of people who lived at the bottom rung of civilized societies.

’In fact, the end of civilisations rarely involved a sudden cataclysm or apocalypse. Often the process is protracted, mild, and leaves people and culture continuing for many years.…’

Via Aeon Ideas

I wore out several copies of the first Koerner Ray and Glover album, Blues, Rags and Hollers (1963), and I’m going to spin it up right now…

Approval ratings in key states look bad for 2020 reelection odds:

’…deep underwater in New Hampshire, Wisconsin, Michigan, and other key 2020 states.…’

Via Trump approval ratings in key states look bad for 2020 reelection odds – Vox

None of this is normal by the standard of any other president. The trip is a perfect illustration of what people feared from a Trump presidency: an immature, impulsive bully leveraging his office to demean his enemies and promote his business interests.

’President Donald Trump’s state visit to the United Kingdom began with him firing off tweets from Air Force One calling London Mayor Sadiq Khan “a stone cold loser” and culminated with him posting tweets at 1:30 am London time on Wednesday denigrating actress Bette Midler as a “Washed up psycho.”

In between, the president called Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer “a creep” and urged his supporters to boycott AT&T because of his displeasure with how CNN covers him. He also did a television interview with Piers Morgan in which he demonstrated appalling ignorance about climate science and attempted to walk back a comment he’d recently made about Duchess of Sussex Meghan Markle being “nasty” — by calling her “nasty” again.

Trump was accompanied to the UK by his adult children and their spouses, despite the fact that only two of them (Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner) actually have official government roles. The New York Times responded by describing the Trump family as “the American answer to British royalty.”

Then, at the end of his three-day state visit, Trump left England to travel to Doonbeg, a tiny coastal town in Ireland that is home to a golf course he still owns and profits from.

Ahead of his arrival in Doonbeg, Trump had a brief meeting in Shannon, Ireland, with Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar. During a photo op, a reporter asked him, “Is this trip for you just about promoting your golf club?”…’

Via Vox

’Apple’s marketing claims about Dark Mode’s benefits fly in the face of the science of human visual perception. Except in extraordinary situations, Dark Mode is not easy on the eyes, in any way. The human eyes and brain prefer dark-on-light, and reversing that forces them to work harder to read text, parse controls, and comprehend what you’re seeing.

It may be hip and trendy, but put bluntly, Dark Mode likely makes those who turn it on slower and less productive. Here’s why, if you adopted Dark Mode purely because Apple promoted it as the new hotness, you should think hard about switching back to the Light Mode that your eyes and brain prefer in System Preferences > General.…’

Via TidBITS

’Most of us have experienced a vague sense of feeling “burned out” by work, but now there’s a specific definition for what that actually means. The World Health Organization recently updated their International Classification of Disease codes (ICD–11) to define burnout as a syndrome with three dimensions.

The new definition doesn’t mean that burnout (or, as they call it, “burn-out”) is a disease; it’s classified as a “factor influencing health status.” Here’s the new definition:

Burn-out is a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. It is characterized by three dimensions: 1) feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion; 2) increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job; and 3) reduced professional efficacy. Burn-out refers specifically to phenomena in the occupational context and should not be applied to describe experiences in other areas of life.

If you feel like you meet the criteria for burnout, you might want to mention it next time you’re seeking medical or mental health care. On its own, burnout isn’t considered a medical condition, but it represents added stress in your life that you may need to deal with…’

Via Lifehacker

Related: How America Created “Burnout”:

Steven Hopper notes that working overtime is the norm in America, that many cannot afford time off from work in the only advanced economy that does not mandate paid vacation leave for its workers. Even when paid time off is provided, many Americans do not use their available time off. 

‘American society has bred a culture of “work harder to get ahead”, so many Americans feel like taking vacation would mean sacrificing their future career success. It is precisely this culture of work more and vacation less that is leading to increased rates of burn-out among Americans…’

Via Medium

Adds Speed Trap Alerts in 40 Countries:

’Folks, I’ve got some great news if you’re a driver and some bad news if you’re a cop: Google has confirmed it’s rolling out the ability to see speed and mobile cameras, as well as speed limits, in more than 40 countries in Maps.

…They’re neat features, if the Google-owned navigation app Waze is any indication, the tech giant may see some pushback from law enforcement. Earlier this year, CBS New York obtained a cease and desist letter sent by the NYPD to Google over Waze alerts for DWI checkpoints. That letter, which can be read in full here, claimed that sharing information about the checkpoints with the app’s users “is irresponsible since it only serves to aid impaired and intoxicated drivers to evade checkpoints and encourage reckless driving.”…’

Via Gizmodo

’Over the course of two articles, one published in 2017 and the other just a few days ago, the NYT describes encounters between a carrier strike group centered around USS Nimitz in 2004 and aircrew from the USS Theodore Roosevelt in the 2014/2015 timeframe. The encounters with the utterly unidentified flying objects left highly trained and skilled sailors manning radars and flying some of the world’s most sophisticated fighter jets as at a loss as anyone else in describing what they had seen.…’

Via jalopnik.com

’This is thought to be the first photo of an all-albino panda. The beautiful animal was photographed by a trail camera at the Wolong National Nature Reserve in Sichuan Province, China. From The Guardian:

Local researchers said they believed the panda to be between one and two years old. The sex could not be determined from the photo, taken by an infrared camera installed in December last year to monitor wildlife in the area.

Spotting the albino panda is incredibly rare, given how infrequently albinism manifests. The giant panda, native to China, is the rarest member of the bear species, with fewer than 2,000 remaining in the wild……’

Via Boing Boing

What It’s Like to Have Multiple Personalities:

’Formerly called “multiple-personality disorder” and most often associated with murderous con artists on shows like Law & Order: SVU, dissociative-identity disorder (DID) is a widely misunderstood and controversial diagnosis. DID remains listed in the DSM–5, the most recent psychiatric diagnostic manual, where it is defined as “an identity disruption” involving two or more personality states, each of which may vary in behavior, memory, affect, and sensory-motor functioning, among other factors. Yet many professionals in the field have argued for its removal, even going so far as to call the diagnosis “bogus.”

Those who affirm DID’s legitimacy, like Bethany Brand, a clinical psychologist and professor of psychology at Towson University, say that much of the controversy stems from the fact that most mental-health professionals have “shockingly little” training in trauma. DID, she says, is a trauma-based disorder, typically (though not always) formed by children in response to “very early, profound, chronic childhood abuse.”…’

Via The Cut

’Allergies driving you crazy? You may be a victim of “botanical sexism,” the exclusive planting of male trees, which plagues many cities.…’

Via Atlas Obscura

Here are some of the pearls:

• “The first thing they told us in culinary school when you’re learning food safety is: If you enter a seafood restaurant and smell fish, leave.”
• “Ask where your oysters come from. If they don’t know, you don’t want them. Same for most seafood.”
• “In culinary school, every single chef instructor says the same thing: If it’s misspelled on the menu, that’s on purpose. It’s so they don’t have to sell you the real thing. A prime example is ‘krab cakes.'”
• “When the menus are super dirty and never cleaned, that means everything is super dirty and never cleaned.”
• “Don’t order fish on Sundays. Most places get their fish deliveries on a Monday and on a Thursday. Fish goes off fairly quickly, and on a Sunday it’s really not great.”
• “If a pitcher of water touches your glass, it has also touched everyone else’s glass. Also, if you can’t see them pour your water, there’s something wrong.”
  

  Via BuzzFeed.

’Around the world, amateur astronomers are monitoring a strange phenomenon on the verge of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot (GRS). The giant storm appears to be unraveling. “I haven’t seen this before in my 17-or-so years of imaging Jupiter,” reports veteran observer Anthony Wesley of Australia, who photographed a streamer of gas detaching itself from the GRS on May 19th:

The plume of gas is enormous, stretching more than 10,000 km from the central storm to a nearby jet stream that appears to be carrying it away. Wesley says that such a streamer is peeling off every week or so.…’

Via Spaceweather.com

Did Everest ‘Traffic Jam’ Contribute to Climber’s Death?

’Earlier this week, American climber Don Cash died on Everest hours after he had reached the summit. As Alan Arnette reported for Outside, Cash was one of about 200 people who went to the top of the world that day, and he encountered a traffic jam on his way down. “When Cash and his Sherpa guides got to the Hillary Step they were forced to wait their turn for at least two hours,” wrote Arnette.…’

Via Outside Online

’In 1960, David Latimer put some compost, water, and plant seeds into a large glass jar and sealed it up. And it’s been growing like that ever since, save for when Latimer opened the bottle to water it in 1972.

It’s easy to take nature and evolution for granted but think about how marvelous this is. Over billions of years, an ecosystem evolved on Earth that can sustain itself basically forever using light from the Sun.…’

Via Kottke

’The effort could cause a massive partisan fight over Iran.…’

Via Vox

’Since January 1, the rash- and fever-causing virus has sickened 880 people across 24 states. That’s more than all the cases of the past three years combined. The epicenter for this year’s spike is two outbreaks in New York—in Brooklyn and Rockland County—that public health officials have been struggling to curb since last fall. And the longer the virus continues to circulate in these communities, and spread to new ones, the more likely it is the US will be plunged back into a time when measles hot spots persist as a constant daily presence.…’

Via WIRED

’With the seemingly endless growth of the Democratic primary field, social behaviorists are worried that we may suffer from choice overload.…’

Via Big Think

’Yemen leads the list of the most fragile nations, with the U.S. and U.K. among the “most worsened.”…’

Via Big Think

’Our greatest achievement as a species has been to break free from the sheer naked ferocity of evolution. It means we need GM food to avoid starvation. We need additives to ensure that the food we grow can be safely consumed before it spoils — an important consideration for an increasing population. And most importantly of all, we need vaccines to prevent disease. We must never again expose our children to the wholesome, fully organic, unblemished and obscene fury of Mother Nature unleashed. Love science, hate evolution. Coming to a car bumper sticker near you soon, I hope.…’

Via Big Think

’In 2008, a ceramic bottle packed with about fifty bent copper alloy pins, some rusty nails, and a bit of wood or bone was discovered during an archaeological investigation by the Museum of London Archaeology Service. Now known as the “Holywell witch-bottle,” the vessel, which dates between 1670 and 1710, is believed to be a form of ritual protection that was hidden beneath a house near Shoreditch High Street in London.

“The most common contents of a witch-bottle are bent pins and urine, although a range of other objects were also used,” writes archaeologist Eamonn P. Kelly in Archaeology Ireland. Sometimes the bottles were glass, but others were ceramic or had designs with human faces. A witch bottle might contain nail clippings, iron nails, hair, thorns, and other sharp materials, all selected to conjure a physical charm for protection. “It was thought that the bending of the pins ‘killed’ them in a ritual sense, which meant that they then existed in the ‘otherworld’ where the witch travelled. The urine attracted the witch into the bottle, where she became trapped on the sharp pins,” Kelly writes.

It’s probable many witch bottles were made as a remedy at a time when available medicine fell short.
Akin to witch marks, which were carved or burned onto windows, doors, fireplaces, and other entrances to homes in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, witch bottles were embedded in buildings across the British Isles and later the United States at these same entry points. “The victim would bury the bottle under or near the hearth of his house, and the heat of the hearth would animate the pins or iron nails and force the witch to break the link or suffer the consequences,” anthropologist Christopher C. Fennell explains in the International Journal of Historical Archaeology.…’

Via JSTOR Daily

’Marie Kondo has convinced us of the morality of purging. If we knew where our clothes ended up, though, we’d feel differently… The problem is that most of our donated clothing does not reach any sort of higher purpose; it just ends up as waste. Clothing is one of the fastest-growing categories in landfills in the U.S. Almost 24 billion pounds of clothes and shoes are thrown out each year, more than double what we tossed two decades ago. And there’s every reason to believe the show only added to the problem, Adele Meyer, executive director of the Association of Resale Professionals, confirmed to me.…’

Via Slate

’It’s been eight years since the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami damaged the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. The resulting damage led to hydrogen explosions and a partial meltdown, releasing radiation into the surrounding area. After workers’ brave efforts stabilized the situation, they began to focus on long-term cleanup. The cleanup recently reached a major milestone when workers began removing nuclear fuel rods for disposal. But how do you really clean up a nuclear accident?…’

Via JSTOR Daily

’RECENTLY AT THE Laboratory for Laser Energetics in Brighton, New York, one of the world’s most powerful lasers blasted a droplet of water, creating a shock wave that raised the water’s pressure to millions of atmospheres and its temperature to thousands of degrees. X-rays that beamed through the droplet in the same fraction of a second offered humanity’s first glimpse of water under those extreme conditions.

The X-rays revealed that the water inside the shock wave didn’t become a superheated liquid or gas. Paradoxically—but just as physicists squinting at screens in an adjacent room had expected—the atoms froze solid, forming crystalline ice…

The findings, published this week in Nature, confirm the existence of “superionic ice,” a new phase of water with bizarre properties. Unlike the familiar ice found in your freezer or at the north pole, superionic ice is black and hot. A cube of it would weigh four times as much as a normal one. It was first theoretically predicted more than 30 years ago, and although it has never been seen until now, scientists think it might be among the most abundant forms of water in the universe.

Across the solar system, at least, more water probably exists as superionic ice—filling the interiors of Uranus and Neptune—than in any other phase, including the liquid form sloshing in oceans on Earth, Europa and Enceladus. The discovery of superionic ice potentially solves decades-old puzzles about the composition of these “ice giant” worlds.…’

Via WIRED

How to do nothing: resisting the attention economy:

’In 2015, Jenny Odell started an organization she called The Bureau of Suspended Objects. Odell was then an artist-in-residence at a waste operating station in San Francisco. As the sole employee of her bureau, she photographed things that had been thrown out and learned about their histories. (A bird-watcher, Odell is friendly with a pair of crows that sit outside her apartment window; given her talent for scavenging, you wonder whether they’ve shared tips.)

Odell’s first book, “How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy,” echoes the approach she took with her bureau, creating a collage (or maybe it’s a compost heap) of ideas about detaching from life online, built out of scraps collected from artists, writers, critics and philosophers. In the book’s first chapter, she remarks that she finds things that already exist “infinitely more interesting than anything I could possibly make.” Then, summoning the ideas of others, she goes on to construct a complex, smart and ambitious book that at first reads like a self-help manual, then blossoms into a wide-ranging political manifesto.…’

Via The New York Times

’“Prohibitionist strategy is unsustainable,” reads the policy plan…. The five-year policy plan calls for prescribing treatment programs instead of punishments to drug users. It’s unclear what effects the laws would have on Mexican cartels, which make the bulk of their money selling drugs in the U.S.…’

Via Big Think

People who live further west in a time zone experience fewer days with natural morning light. As a result, they depend upon electric light to get ready for work and other business of the day. Lighter colors mean more mornings per year in light.

’Writing in the Journal of Health Economics, authors Osea Giuntella of the University of Pittsburgh and Fabrizio Mazzonna of Università della Svizzera Italiana took an innovative slant on the effect of position in a time zone on health and economics. They were interested in something called “social jet lag.”

The idea is that given the constraints of modern life, most people are out of sync with their natural circadian rhythms, which should follow the sun. Instead, we use electric light to synchronize most of our societal activities regardless of where the sun is at in its course through the heavens.

The conflict is that the primordial cycle of light and dark from the sun is deeply embedded within our evolutionary past as coded in our DNA; we have a “built-in” biological time for body temperature, hormone levels, sleep, and much more, that cycles very close to 24 hours.

Modern society requires synchronization in such things as school start times, work times and television watching times. All of these can desynchronize our social activity from our biological time. There is mounting evidence that chronic circadian rhythm disruption leads to several serious diseases as well as depression and mood disorders. On a societal level, the economic impact may also be large.

Lefties of a boundary healthier than righties?

As a test of this idea, Giuntella and Mazzonna predicted that at the boundaries between time zones within the United States, people on the left side of the boundary would be healthier than people on the right side, and the economies stronger; the left side would be the eastern extreme of one time zone, and the right side would be the western extreme of the adjacent time zone. The sun sets about an hour later on the right side.

Their primary unit of analysis was the county. They used data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and from the U.S. Census, as well as information on sleep duration and quality from two national surveys. They did several different analyses, one of which was to group counties within 100 miles of the time zone boundary into two groups, one on the left side and one on the right side. They then compared the two groups for health outcomes.

As they predicted, there were discontinuities between counties on either side of time zone boundaries in sleep and in risk of obesity, diabetes, heart disease and breast cancer. In each case, counties on the right side of the boundary did worse: shorter sleep and higher risk of disease. They then calculated an overall composite health index using the diseases cited above, and it, too, was lower in the counties on the right side. They ascribe their findings to the later clock time of sunset on the right side of the boundary.…’

Via The Conversation

’While browsing the GOES Image Viewer a few months ago, I had an idea: with the data frequency that these new GOES satellites provide, I could build a Mac app that pulls the newest image every 20 minutes and sets it as your desktop background.

What resulted was a simple little menu bar app that gives you a near real-time view of Earth all day long. I’ve been using it for a few weeks as I’ve built it, and it is an absolute joy to have a window to Earth all day.…’

Via Main Engine Cut Off (thanks to Jason Snell)

’Just 100 companies produce 71 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases. This map lists their names and locations, and their CEOs. The climate crisis may be too complex for these 100 people to solve, but naming and shaming them is a good start.…’

Via Big Think

On the risks of immersing oneself in a role:

’In 2008, actor Heath Ledger accidentally overdosed on sleeping pills and died, aged 28.
One myth that attached itself to Ledger’s death was that it was somehow a result of immersing himself in the character of the Joker.
New research suggest that fully immersed actors “forget themselves” in the sense that they actively ignore facts about who they are, temporarily subordinating their own thoughts and feelings to those of their character.…’

Via Big Think

And humans will suffer as a result:

• The United Nations reported that nature is declining at an unparalleled rate, and humans are the cause. [Washington Post / Darryl Fears](https://voxcom.cmail19.com/t/d-l-pttihdt-puyhiujv-t/)
• The UN’s biodiversity report outlines a shocking reality: 1 million species are on the verge of extinction, which threatens human survival as well. [[National Geographic / Stephen Leahy](https://voxcom.cmail19.com/t/d-l-pttihdt-puyhiujv-i/)
• Climate change is the driving force behind this decline. Overfishing, the use of fossil fuels, pollution, and neglect of the growth of invasive species have also been identified as the cause behind the dwindling biodiversity. [NYT / Brad Plumer](https://voxcom.cmail19.com/t/d-l-pttihdt-puyhiujv-d/)
• While this isn’t the first report to predict Earth’s grim future, this report stands out because it details how humans drastically rely on the well-being of these specimens. The health of our ecosystem is directly tied to food security and access to clean water. [Smithsonian Magazine / Maddie Burakoff](https://voxcom.cmail19.com/t/d-l-pttihdt-puyhiujv-h/)
• The situation has already gotten so bad that small efforts will not suffice, and governments will need to make transformative changes if they want to save the planet. Some of the solutions suggested by the authors include adopting techniques that grow more food on less land and cracking down on illegal logging and fishing. [AP / Seth Borenstein](https://voxcom.cmail19.com/t/d-l-pttihdt-puyhiujv-k/)
• Nations have begun to recognize the threat of a failing ecosystem, and two high-level summits have already been scheduled for world leaders to discuss their conservation goals in 2020. [CNN / Isabelle Gerretsen](https://voxcom.cmail19.com/t/d-l-pttihdt-puyhiujv-b/)
• The UN report sends a dire message to all nations that action needs to be made –– quickly. Changing lifestyles to prevent a climate catastrophe may seem arduous, but the cost of doing nothing will be much higher. [Guardian / Robert Watson](https://voxcom.cmail19.com/t/d-l-pttihdt-puyhiujv-n/)

Study: People who swear are more honest:

’There are two conflicting perspectives regarding the relationship between profanity and dishonesty. These two forms of norm-violating behavior share common causes, and are often considered to be positively related. On the other hand, however, profanity is often used to express one’s genuine feelings, and could therefore be negatively related to dishonesty. In three studies, we explored the relationship between profanity and honesty. … We found a consistent positive relationship between profanity and honesty; profanity was associated with less lying and deception at the individual level, and with higher integrity at the society level.…’

Via Stanford Graduate School of Business

Suzie Lopez:

’The Wake has been called “the most colossal leg pull in literature” and even Joyce’s patron fell out with him over it. But Wake scholarship is thriving more than ever. In the words of Joyce Scholar Sam Slote almost “any analysis will be incomplete.” After Ulysses, Joyce was interested in the subconscious interior monologue, our dreaming lives. He also wanted to shatter the conventions of language to form an almost eternal every-language. It sounds somewhat like the dial of a radio in Joyce’s time, static turning into myriad languages. Joyce intentionally made passages more obscure to evoke radio. PHD candidate Yuta Imazeki has calculated “numbers of portmanteaux and foreign words in the radio passage” that are higher in frequency than any others; intentionally obscure. So is it an indecipherable ruse or a harbinger of hypertext? Could it even be… therapeutic? As a self-taught enthusiast, how did I even get into this?…’

Via Literary Hub

’Jon Stewart was once asked to describe his importance as a political commentator on The Daily Show. He replied: “On a scale of zero to 10, I’d go with a zero, not very important.”

That was dead wrong, according to a new study that suggests Stewart’s 2015 departure from the left-leaning show caused not only a drop in ratings, but also a slight drop in voter turnout in the 2016 presidential election – enough to tip the scales in favor of President Donald Trump.…’

Via Big Think

’All life as we know it relies on carbon and water. But researchers speculate this doesn’t have to be the case..…’

Via Big Think

NASA astronomer Michelle Thaller explains how the universe itself has been a salve for her fears:

’The universe chooses people to be interested it, she says. What has the universe chosen you for?…’

Via Big Think

Dementia, disrespect, and loneliness – that is not your future, says aging expert Ashton Applewhite:

’The best anti-aging advice? Stop stereotyping old people! Cultural messaging about the pitfalls of old age causes undue stress that prematurely ages the brain and shortens life spans.
People who have a positive outlook on aging can live 7.5 years longer than those who buy into cultural stereotypes about getting old.…’

Via Big Think

Brian Dooley:

’Choosing the right candidate to beat Trump is obviously a massively important decision, but American progressives look like they’re making the same mistakes that we on the left in Britain made in the 1980s in responding to Margaret Thatcher.
At the age of 16 I campaigned in the 1979 general election against Thatcher. Despite my endearing appeals across hundreds of doorsteps, she won, ushering in 18 years of continuous Conservative Party rule.
During the early 1980s I was a local Labour Party activist in Britain, and like many others on the left responded to Thatcher’s win by deriding those who had voted for her. It’s a mistake I see happening in America now.
We thought we would win by making it socially unacceptable to support Thatcher, and we focused on proving how uncool it was to vote Conservative. We called Thatcher supporters much worse things than deplorables, and felt good mocking their narrow nationalism.…’

Via Medium