Diverless Cars

Self-driving vehicles are steadily becoming a reality despite the many hurdles still to be overcome – and they could change our world in some unexpected ways.

It's a late night in the Metro area of Phoenix, Arizona. Under the artificial glare of street lamps, a car can be seen slowly approaching. Active sensors on the vehicle radiate a low hum. A green and blue 'W' glows from the windscreen, giving off just enough light to see inside – to a completely empty driver seat.

The wheel navigates the curb steadily, parking as an arrival notification pings on the phone of the person waiting for it. When they open the door to climb inside, a voice greets them over the vehicle's sound system. "Good evening, this car is all yours – with no one upfront," it says.

This is a Waymo One robotaxi, hailed just 10 minutes ago using an app. The open use of this service to the public, slowly expanding across the US, is one of the many developments signalling that driverless technology is truly becoming a part of our lives.

The promise of driverless technology has long been enticing. It has the potential to transform our experience of commuting and long journeys, take people out of high-risk working environments and streamline our industries. It's key to helping us build the cities of the future, where our reliance and relationship with cars are redefined – lowering carbon emissions and paving the way for more sustainable ways of living. 

And it could make our travel safer. The World Health Organization estimates that more than 1.3 million people die each year as a result of road traffic crashes. "We want safer roads and less fatalities. Automation ultimately could provide that," says Camilla Fowler, head of automated transport for the UK's Transport Research Laboratory (TRL).  READ MORE...

Nightmare

 

Swirling

Ocean's Tiniest Orgasms Helped

Without an explosion in ocean life more than 2 billion years ago, many of Earth's mountains might never have formed, according to new research.

When tiny organisms in the shallows of the sea, like plankton, die and sink to the bottom, they can add organic carbon to Earth's crust, making it weaker and more pliable.

A case study of 20 mountain ranges around the world, including those in the Rockies, the Andes, Svalbard, central Europe, Indonesia, and Japan, has now linked the timing of high carbon burial in the ocean with the very generation of our planet's peaks.

"The additional carbon allowed easier deformation of the crust, in a manner that built mountain belts, and thereby plate margins characteristic of modern plate tectonics," the researchers write.

The changes seem to have begun roughly 2 billion years ago, in the middle of the Paleoproterozoic Era, when biological carbon from plankton and bacteria began to add exceptionally high concentrations of graphite to the ocean floor's shale. This made the rock brittle and more likely to stack.

Within 100 million years, most mountain ranges began to form in these weakened slices of crust. Mountain ranges that emerged more recently follow the same pattern.

In the Himalayas, for instance, tectonic thrusting around 50 million years ago was focused on Paleoproterozoic sediments with the most organic-rich beds.

The timing and location implies that biological carbon in graphite continues to shape the geology of our planet.  READ MORE... 

Classic Sunday Morning Newspaper Cartoons

 

Getting In Touch With Women Technologists

Dropboxers love a lot of things: posting pictures of their pets, bonding over coffee, helping each other protect their mental health, solving complicated tech puzzles, and everything in between. 

But one of the things they love most is showing up, making connections, and even recruiting new Dropboxers at tech conferences across the U.S. — or more recently, virtually from their homes!

One of the biggest conferences we attend each year is the Grace Hopper Celebration (GHC for short) — the world’s largest gathering of women technologists, where women from around the world learn, network, and celebrate their achievements. 

During the four-day event, attendees have nearly limitless opportunities to connect with one another.

One standout part of the conference is the Career Fair, during which attendees can swing by the virtual booths of various companies to meet employees and explore job opportunities. 

During the course of the conference, we had over 800 individuals “check in” at our Dropbox booth! We never had less than 10 people present at our virtual booth at a time, getting to know each other through chat messages or video.  READ MORE...

Expensive

 

The Future for US Aircraft Carriers

The United States has decided to spend many billions of dollars on the CVN-78 (“Ford”) class of aircraft carriers to replace the venerable Nimitz class. 

The latter has served the U.S. Navy since 1975, with the last ship (USS George H. W. Bush) entering service in 2009. The Fords could be in service, in one configuration or another, until the end of the 21st century.

Just as the U.S. government has determined to make this investment, numerous analysts have argued that the increasing lethality of anti-access/area denial systems (especially China’s, but also Russia and Iran) has made the aircraft carrier obsolete.  

If so, investing in a class of ships intended to serve for 90 years might look like a colossal waste of money.

As with any difficult debate, we should take time to define our terms, and clarify the stakes. The anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) systems around the world may indeed curb the effectiveness of the Ford class, but the U.S. will still find uses for this ships.  READ MORE...

Unsteady

Dan Bongino

 

Fish

 

Wild

Breakfast Habits

Inflammation can be a tricky issue. On the one hand, it is a necessary process that our bodies need to heal from injury, which is known as acute inflammation. On the other, it can lead to serious health issues and illness if it turns chronic, which is the type we will be referring to in this article.

Chronic inflammation can be caused by things like autoimmune disorders, exposure to toxins, obesity, and an inactive lifestyle, and according to Harvard Health, it "plays a central role" in diseases like diabetes, heart disease, certain cancers, and Alzheimer's.

Because of inflammation's connection to weight, diet, and exercise, there are certain foods that we can eat and avoid to help lower our chances of developing chronic inflammation in the long run.

Continue reading to learn about some of the worst breakfast foods and breakfast habits for inflammation, and for more tips on inflammation, make sure to check out Popular Foods For Reducing Inflammation After 50.

Eating refined carbohydratesShutterstock

When it comes to inflammation, added sugar and refined carbohydrates are some of the leading culprits.

"One of the worst breakfast habits for inflammation is eating refined carbohydrates and foods high in added sugar like packaged pastries, donuts, and baked goods," says Amy Goodson, MS, RD, CSSD, LD author of The Sports Nutrition Playbook.

Lauren Manaker, MS, RDN, registered dietitian on our medical expert board and author of The First Time Mom's Pregnancy Cookbook and Fueling Male Fertility agrees, saying that "sugary and refined pastries like donuts and muffins can be loaded with ingredients that can contribute to inflammation, so it's best to stick to whole grain options without questionable ingredients instead."  READ MORE...

Cat & Dog

 

800 Year Old Mummy

800 Year Old Mummy - Peru

A team of experts has found a mummy estimated to be at least 800 years old on Peru’s central coast, one of the archaeologists who participated in the excavation said on Friday.  The mummified remains were of a person from the culture that developed between the coast and mountains of the South American country.The mummy, whose gender was not identified, was discovered in the Lima region, said archaeologist Pieter Van Dalen Luna.

“The main characteristic of the mummy is that the whole body was tied up by ropes and with the hands covering the face, which would be part of the local funeral pattern,” said Van Dalen Luna, from the State University of San Marcos.

The remains are of a person who lived in the high Andean region of the country, he said. “Radiocarbon dating will give a more precise chronology.”

The mummy was found inside an underground structure found on the outskirts of the city of Lima. In the tomb were also offerings including ceramics, vegetable remains and stone tools, he said.

Peru – home to tourist destination Machu Picchu – is home to hundreds of archaeological sites from cultures that developed before and after the Inca Empire, which dominated the southern part of South America 500 years ago, from southern Ecuador and Colombia to central Chile.

Passenger Bird

 

Rolling Back US-China Tariffs

Eliminating tariffs imposed on goods during the worst of the trade war would help ease inflation in the U.S., former Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew told CNBC on Tuesday.But there’s currently “no political space” to do so, he said on CNBC’s “Street Signs Asia.”

“I think that the United States and China have deep differences. I’ve never thought it should just be about negotiating the exchange of one good or another on one side or the other. It should be about a level playing field,” Lew said. He served as treasury secretary from 2013 to 2017 during the Obama administration.

He continued: “I’ve thought from the beginning that the tariffs were an ineffective way to deal with their attacks on American consumers. And right now, with inflation being an issue, rolling back tariffs would actually reduce inflation in the United States.”

Relations between Washington and Beijing took a turn for the worse in 2018, when the Trump administration imposed tariffs on billions of dollars worth of Chinese goods and Beijing retaliated with similar punitive measures, drawing both sides into a protracted trade war.

U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods stood at an average of 19.3% on a trade-weighted basis in early 2021, while Chinese tariffs on American products were at about 20.7%, according to data compiled by think tank Peterson Institute for International Economics earlier this year.

Before the trade war, U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods were on average 3.1% in early 2018 while China’s tariffs on American goods were at 8%, the data showed.

Referring to rolling back tariffs, Lew said: “Both the leaders have to, I think, create political space in our two countries for these issues to be issues where you can move and make progress, because otherwise we either stay where we are. It gets worse. I think we can do better.”  READ MORE...

Dolphin

I Don't Know What I Don't Know

 BULLSHIT...  is the first word that comes to my
mind and why do you think that is?

Because,

people DO KNOW when they do not know something and when they use this phrase they are just playing with words...  saying I know that I don't know...  so, my phrase therefore is correct...

My comment to that is that if you know what you don't know then it is virtually impossible not to know what you don't know as to two concepts are mutually exclusive.

OF COURSE, that you don't know that you don't know or is that still knowing that you don't know?

I am sure there are things from a distant planet that you don't know, but even when you say that, you are saying that you know you don't know those things...

Clever people like this have their heads up their asses and makes me feel like I should buy them a glass bellybutton for them to see out of...

Political Humor