John Cox

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Interesting

medium.com

52 things I learned in 2020 - Magnetic Notes - Medium

This is Tom Whitwell's annual "52 things I learned" roundup, a grab-bag list of curious facts and findings gathered over the year rather than a single argument—covering everything from why municipal trees are planted male, to the hidden Fetal Bovine Serum in lab-grown meat, to attractive criminals getting lighter sentences, to Warsaw's clam-powered water safety system. It's worth keeping as a dense trivia stockpile with sourced links for each claim, useful for dinner-party facts, writing hooks, or spotting patterns across unrelated fields like tech, biology, economics, and history.

Permalink technologyculturehistoryenergy

Moss and Fog

Prague's Cutting Edge New Planetarium Sets Records

The Prague Planetarium has reopened after a two-year renovation with Europe's first full LED dome featuring 45 million pixels and 8K-plus resolution, allowing for vivid, immersive 360-degree displays of astronomical content and other visual experiences. Engineers integrated the cutting-edge technology into the 1950s historic building while expanding seating capacity by 20 percent and maintaining architectural constraints. Unlike Las Vegas's larger Sphere designed for concerts and spectacle, Prague's dome prioritizes scientific clarity and detail, positioning the venue as both an educational institution and a cultural landmark for immersive storytelling.

Permalink technologyarchitecturetravelscience

Scientific American

Can You Change Your Metabolism?

Most claims about "boosting metabolism" are either false or dangerous, according to evolutionary anthropologists and nutrition researchers—your metabolic rate is largely determined by your body composition (particularly muscle mass) and doesn't significantly slow until around age 60, contrary to popular belief. While building muscle, eating protein-rich foods, exercising early in the day, and getting good sleep can make small improvements to metabolic rate and weight management, the body has a set energy expenditure boundary that adjusts when you try to push past it through extreme exercise or calorie restriction, making sustainable weight loss fundamentally about consistently eating fewer calories rather than "revving" your metabolism.

Permalink nutritionhealthweight lossscience

Atlas Obscura

When Every Ketchup But One Went Extinct

In the early 1900s, Harvey Wiley's crusade against chemical preservatives in ketchup found an unlikely corporate ally in Henry Heinz, who discovered that boiling tomatoes with high amounts of vinegar and sugar could create shelf-stable preservative-free ketchup—a breakthrough that helped Heinz defeat competitors who relied on benzoates and ultimately dominated the American market by 1911. While this victory improved food safety by forcing manufacturers to use better-quality ingredients and sanitation practices, it came at the cost of extinguishing the diverse, complex flavors that had characterized earlier ketchups, which ranged from sour and thin to fermented and varied. Today, craft ketchup makers are attempting to resurrect these lost flavor profiles from old recipes and historical cookbooks.

Permalink foodhistorysciencebusiness

X (formerly Twitter)

the Guardian

Eyewitness: The Earth at night | World news | guardian.co.uk

NASA's new satellite has captured nighttime imagery of Earth revealing human settlement patterns and activity across continents with far greater resolution than previously possible, showing the distribution of cities, infrastructure, and population density through light emissions from Europe, Asia, and Africa. The photographs demonstrate how artificial lighting from human civilization creates a visible glow that can be detected from space, providing scientists with detailed data about urbanization, energy use, and human geography across the globe.

Permalink photographysciencenewsclimate

Businessweek.com

It's Global Warming, Stupid - Businessweek

Hurricane Sandy's devastating impact—40 deaths, $50 billion in losses, millions without power—illustrates how climate change amplifies severe weather events even if it doesn't directly cause individual storms. Scientists and corporate reinsurers increasingly agree that warming oceans provide more energy for storms, the atmosphere retains more moisture, and altered Arctic patterns can intensify coastal hurricanes, with evidence suggesting these mechanisms were at work in Sandy specifically. The piece argues that despite political gridlock and declining public concern about climate change, the U.S. must pursue pragmatic solutions including natural gas as a bridge fuel, carbon pricing mechanisms, improved disaster infrastructure, and renewed federal commitment to climate negotiations—otherwise, increasingly frequent catastrophic storms will continue destabilizing the economy.

Permalink sciencenewseconomicsclimate

Popular Science

The Boy Who Played With Fusion [via Longreads]

Taylor Wilson, a 16-year-old nuclear physicist profiled here, has built a working fusion reactor in a university lab after teaching himself nuclear physics through internet research and hands-on experimentation with radioactive materials. Inspired by his grandmother's cancer diagnosis, Wilson conceived the idea of using fusion to generate medical isotopes that could be produced locally in hospitals rather than requiring expensive cyclotrons and jet delivery, and he subsequently designed a neutron detector to scan shipping containers for weapons of mass destruction. Unlike David Hahn, a cautionary tale of an earlier teenage nuclear hobbyist whose secretive experiments led to contamination and arrest, Wilson succeeded by gaining the support of mentors, his unconventional parents who encouraged rather than forbade his dangerous pursuits, and institutions like the Davidson Academy that could provide resources and oversight.

Permalink scienceeducation

Scientific American

The Smart Way to Play God with Earth's Limited Land: Scientific American

Lynas argues that 83 percent of Earth's ice-free land is already human-influenced and that "wilderness" is effectively extinct, making traditional conservation approaches obsolete. Rather than pursuing low-impact rural living or halting land conversion, he contends that humanity should concentrate its impact through intensified agriculture on existing farmland, aggressive urbanization, and electrified transport, while allowing marginal lands to rewild and protecting high-biodiversity areas—a strategy that also slows population growth through demographic transition. He specifically advocates scrapping biofuel subsidies (except potentially for aviation), switching ground vehicles to electricity, and recognizing that cities, despite their apparent sprawl, actually represent the most environmentally efficient way to house the world's growing population.

Permalink environmentsustainabilityscienceagriculture

Unpacked

A vaccine that can kill cancer | Health

This page announces that ISRAEL21c, a 20-year-old platform celebrating Israeli innovation and culture, has merged with Unpacked, an OpenDor Media brand that produces educational content about Israel, Judaism, and Jewish life through videos, podcasts, and articles. The transition preserves ISRAEL21c's uplifting storytelling while expanding distribution across Unpacked's multiple channels, and existing ISRAEL21c newsletter subscribers will automatically receive the broader Unpacked Community newsletter.

Permalink healthscience

the Guardian

The Marginalian

Six Famous Thought Experiments, Animated in 60 Seconds Each | Brain Pickings

This piece presents six classic thought experiments from philosophy and physics—Zeno's paradox of motion, the grandfather paradox of time travel, Searle's Chinese Room on artificial intelligence, Hilbert's infinite hotel, the twin paradox of relativity, and Schrödinger's cat of quantum mechanics—through animated short videos created by the Open University that make abstract concepts visually accessible and engaging.

Permalink philosophyaiscienceeducation

Boing Boing

How the first image of the whole Earth was taken – Boing Boing

Kelly celebrates the remarkable engineering achievement of Lunar Orbiter 1's 1966 photograph—the first image of Earth from space—which required an ingenious analog system with mechanical moving parts to capture, develop, scan, and transmit film across the vacuum of space without any digital technology. The anecdote serves as a counterpoint to modern technological assumptions, highlighting how earlier generations solved complex problems through mechanical ingenuity rather than electronics.

Permalink technologyhistoryphotographyscience

i.usatoday.net

Academically Interesting

Nobody Understands Probability « Academically Interesting

This post introduces Bayesian statistics and argues that most people misunderstand how to apply probability theory in practice, particularly when observing data rather than running controlled experiments. It explains Bayes' theorem through examples like medical testing and coin fairness, emphasizes the critical distinction between being told information versus restricting to universes where information is true, and demonstrates how to build probabilistic models for concrete problems like clustering before comparing this framework to classical statistical hypothesis testing.

Permalink scienceeducation

BBC News

BBC News - Lung cancer risk 'cut by B vitamin'

A large European study found that people with high blood levels of vitamin B6 and the amino acid methionine had roughly half the risk of developing lung cancer compared to those with low levels, regardless of smoking status. However, experts caution that the correlation may simply reflect healthier overall diets and lifestyles rather than proving that B-vitamins directly prevent cancer, and that quitting smoking remains far more important than any dietary supplement in reducing lung cancer risk. Further research is needed before recommending B-vitamin supplementation as a cancer prevention strategy.

Permalink nutritionhealthscienceresearch