This week, we discuss kidnappings & gunpoint attacks demanding cryptocurrency. We often say that cryptocurrency is unseizable. But in one sense, it’s actually more seizable than dollars in your bank account: Kidnappers’ crypto accounts, unlike bank accounts, are unfreezable and are themselves unseizable — making stolen funds completely unrecoverable.
What can we do to be safe from ransom and wrench attacks?
Bitgenstein’s Table is a narrative podcast with m ...read more
A new review paper in The Neuroscientist highlights the problem of body movements for neuroscience, from blinks to fidgeting.
Authors Patrick J Drew and colleagues of Penn State discuss how many types of movements are associated with widespread brain activation, which can contaminate brain activity recordings. This is true, they say, of both humans and experimental animals such as rodents, e.g. with their ‘whisking’ movements of the whiskers.
A particular concern is that many moveme ...read more
Neil Armstrong (left) as portrayed by Ryan Gosling in First Man (Credit: Universal)
First Man is not like other movies about the space race, and I mean that in a very good way.
I’ll admit, I was skeptical about the director of La La Land telling the story of Neil Armstrong’s historic landing on the Moon. (Would there be songs? A scowling J.K. Simmons?) It turns out to be a synergistic pairing of artist and material. First Man brushes aside the expected saga of space cowboys saddlin ...read more
This animation shows how sea surface temperatures have departed from the long-term average, from August through early October 2018. (Animation by climate.gov; data from NOAA’s Environmental Visualization Lab.)
It’s still not here yet, but El Niño sure looks like it’s coming.
In its latest forecast, NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center says there is a 70 to 75 percent chance that El Niño will form “in the next couple of months and cont ...read more
The D. lab corals, if they make it to adulthood, will have to survive in the world as it is: a world in which the climate is changing, the ocean is acidifying, and the forces of politics and history affect both land and sea. Curaçao, a former Dutch colony, became a separate country in 2010, but it remains part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, which oversees its foreign policy.
For almost two centuries, the island was a hub of the Dutch slave trade, and like other Caribbean cou ...read more
All of the galaxies we see in the distant universe are speeding away from us. This clue led Lemaitre to the idea of an expanding universe: the Big Bang. Credit: NASA/ESA/H. Teplitz and M. Rafelski (IPAC/Caltech)/A. Koekemoer (STScI)/R. Windhorst (Arizona State University)/Z. Levay (STScI)
In 1927, a prescient astronomer named Georges Lemaître looked at data showing how galaxies move. He noticed something peculiar – all of them appeared to be speeding away from Earth. Not only that, ...read more
The leprosy bacteria. (Credit: Kateryna Kon/Shutterstock)
For the past 25 years, Anura Rambukkana has been studying a disease that’s already been cured. He studies leprosy, a disease that was once the scourge of humanity before a course of drugs developed in the mid-20th century brought it under control.
For decades, he’s worked in a field that sees little funding and few new faces, and many of his contemporaries have moved on to higher-profile projects involving diseases that attr ...read more
Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, has a hazy atmosphere – seen here in the box on the left. (Credit: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Space Science Institute, Caltech)
Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, is enveloped in a thick, hazy atmosphere. One new research collaboration has identified a chemical mechanism that could help to explain how the moon’s haze formed.
Titan’s Haze
“Both space probes and land-based instruments have identified the chemical composition of th ...read more
I managed to get to a preview screening of First Man this week! And as someone who has been steeped in Apollo and space history for the better part of her life (I learned about the Moon landing when I was seven and have been obsessed ever since) I have some thoughts about it… Heads up: there are spoilers.
I wanted to love this movie.
The best thing about this movie is it’s gorgeous. Without question, my favourite part was the attention to detail on the hardware. The control pan ...read more
These are the caves where many of the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in 1947. (Credit: Lux Moundi/Flickr)
It all started with a stray goat.
On an otherwise nondescript day in the spring of 1947, a young Bedouin boy searched for a goat that had strayed from his flock just northwest of the Dead Sea. While he was looking, Muhammed the Wolf, as the boy was known, noticed a series of small caves in the limestone cliff above him. Thinking his goat may have gone into one of those caves, and not wan ...read more
