No.191 Asides

☀️ How to Build a Low-tech Solar Panel? “George Cove, a forgotten solar power pioneer, may have built a highly efficient photovoltaic panel 40 years before Bell Labs engineers invented silicon cells. If proven to work, his design could lead to less complex and more sustainable solar panels.”
🇺🇸 👏🏼 🔭 The Webb Space Telescope is 100x as powerful as the Hubble. It will change astronomy. “The Webb will surpass the Hubble in several ways. It will allow astronomers to look not only farther out in space but also further back in time: It will search for the first stars and galaxies of the universe. It will allow scientists to make careful studies of numerous exoplanets — planets that orbit stars other than our sun — and even embark on a search for signs of life there.”
🇮🇹 🏟 They may have founded Rome, then vanished. New work sheds light on the mysterious Etruscans. “Skilled farmers, metalworkers, and merchants, the Etruscans traded extensively with other Mediterranean civilizations. They had a distinct culture, with a more egalitarian role for women, and art that was more stylized and impressionistic than that of their neighbors and seemed to show influences from the eastern Mediterranean. Their language, preserved in fragmentary tomb inscriptions, was completely unrelated to anything spoken by their ancient neighbors or Europeans today.”
📱 🕵🏼 🔫 This is why James Bond doesn’t use an iPhone. “However, an iPhone would not be a good option for 007. “Untraceable phones with anti-surveillance, anti-interception and location spoofing functionality are a must for James Bond. An iPhone, however formatted, just wouldn’t be able to offer this ability to ensure tracking isn’t an option,” says Moore. “The security of an iPhone is impressive enough for the normal user, but with threats such as Pegasus around periodically it makes it difficult for a spy to use one securely and confidently.””
🔗 🎙 How Supply Chain Backups Threaten to Leave Store Shelves Bare. Alexis Madrigal at KQED on supply chains, a thing he knows a thing or two about after his excellent podcast series about containers.
🪐 The five most impressive geological structures in the solar system. “Because geologists love them so much, I give you the seven kilometres-high Verona Rupes. This is a feature on Uranus’s small moon Miranda that is often described as “the tallest cliff in the solar system”, including on a recent Nasa website. This even goes so far as to remark that if you were careless enough to take a tumble off the top, it would take you 12 minutes to fall to the bottom.”
💩 😲 🍼 Baby Poop Is Loaded With Microplastics. “…finding an average of 36,000 nanograms of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) per gram of feces, 10 times the amount they found in adult feces. They even found it in newborns’ first feces. PET is an extremely common polymer that’s known as polyester when it’s used in clothing, and it is also used to make plastic bottles”
⚛️ 🤯 🤔 🤯 🤔 So, with this morning’s @NobelPrize awarded in part to Giorgio Parisi for his work on complex and disordered systems, now might be a good time for a Twitter thread to explain just what exactly a spin glass is, since I’ve spent a lot of my career working on quantum glasses.
🐄 🐖 🐪 Seeing Pastoralism “The stories and images on this website explore how pastoralists understand, experience and respond to uncertainty. They draw on six very different places around the world where pastoralists are living and working in often variable and uncertain conditions.”