One annoyance of ordering items from the internet is waiting for delivery. That's why many companies are set on making sure you get your items as quickly as possible — like Amazon Prime's free two-day shipping.
But shipping, especially fast, comes at an environmental cost. Previous studies have shown that moving goods by conventional aircraft is four times more carbon-intensive than by truck, which is 10 times more carbon-intensive than rail. Since many companies including Amazon, UP ...read more
Mining bitcoin is not a task for your average Joe. As far back as 2014, researchers estimated that profitable bitcoin mining was out of the reach of commercial hardware. The increasing difficulty of solving the equations that yield the digital currency means that it takes an entire server farm today to make it worth it. And you also might have to move to Iceland.
Hot Water, Cold Air
The tiny island country has become a hotbed of bitcoin activity because it's got an excess of two of the ...read more
If you’re a fan of drone technology or a drone pilot yourself, it’s easy to think the tech is mainstream. It's not.
And it turns out drone owners are just a small sliver of Americans — just 8 percent own a flying drone, according to a December 2017 study from Pew Research Center. Even though many people don’t own drones, almost 60 percent have seen someone operating one.
As of January, more than 1 million people have registered as drone owners with the FAA. That include ...read more
Coprolites, or fossilized dung, double as ecological time capsules, preserving an incredible collection of information about past ecosystems.
In Middle Earth (a.k.a. New Zealand) researchers from the University of Adelaide’s Australian Centre for DNA (ACAD) and Landcare Research NZ reconstructed a pre-civilization community using a bird dung time machine. Dung samples were amassed from numerous sites across the continent. The donors: four species of ratite birds including the extinct gian ...read more
Memento (2000) is a complex psychological thriller about a man unable to form long-term memories. The movie is popular among neuroscientists for its accurate depiction of amnesia. Now, in a wonderfully "meta" paper, a group of neuroscientists report that they scanned the brains of people watching Memento in order to study memory processes.
The paper's called Brain mechanisms underlying cue-based memorizing during free viewing of movie Memento, and it's published in Neuroimage, from Finnis ...read more
