Topics in tonight’s diary include:
- Montana youth take state to court re: climate
- Proposal to award Henrietta Lacks the Congressional Gold Medal
- “Our Planet II” review
- Stephen Hawking — the universe is doomed to evaporate
- Our universe may be a giant neural network
- Dupuytren’s disease has Neanderthal roots
- The periodic table you grew up with is wrong
- Toyota battery could offer 900+mile range
- Europe’s oldest language
- WWII special-ops submarine discovered
- The hidden costs of gasoline
- Earliest surviving photographs of the Mediterranean region
Associated Press
by Amy Beth Hansen and Matthew Brown
Young athlete in Montana climate change trial testifies he uses inhaler due to forest fire smoke
A high school athlete who along with 15 other young people took Montana to court over climate change testified Tuesday that increased smoke from forest fires makes it difficult for him to compete and that a doctor prescribed an inhaler to help his breathing problems.
Mica Kantor, now 15, said he has been worried about climate change since as a 4-year-old he dictated a letter to Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., because he was too young to write it himself. He said it’s increasingly difficult to run or go on hikes with his family, and that the warmer conditions have shortened snowboarding seasons.
Mica testified on day two of a first-of-its-kind trial in which the 16 young Montana residents are arguing the state is violating their constitutional rights by failing to keep the environment clean. They’re asking a judge to declare unconstitutional a state law that prevents agencies from considering the effect of greenhouse gasses when they issue permits for fossil fuel development.
Essence
by Melissa Noel
Lawmakers Reintroduce Bill To Posthumously Award Congressional Gold Medal To Henrietta Lacks
On Wednesday, Maryland U.S. Rep. Kweisi Mfume reintroduced a bill in Congress to posthumously award a Congressional Gold Medal to Henrietta Lacks.
Congressional Black Caucus Chairman Steven Horsford, U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump, and the Lacks family joined Mfume. They all want to see her be honored for her contributions to modern science.
“Today, I announced my legislation to honor Henrietta Lacks with the Congressional Medal. Mrs. Lacks’ HeLa Cells altered the future of medical science. I encourage my colleagues to join me in further immortalizing her legacy with our highest expression of national recognition,” Mfume wrote on Twitter.
The Guardian
by Jack Seale
Our Planet II review – so much of David Attenborough’s new show is just astonishing
Sitting at home, breath held, earnestly hoping that some tiny animal thousands of miles from your sofa can survive a life-or-death situation: it’s always been one of the eerie pleasures of a wildlife documentary, despite such a reaction being essentially irrational. What does it matter whether that lizard can outrun those snakes? It’s all part of nature. It’s nothing to do with us.
Well, not any more. The scene that sticks in the mind from Our Planet II, Netflix’s new Attenborough-voiced opus, is of an albatross chick on the tiny Pacific island of Laysan, fighting for life without any predators nearby. The little thing’s opening its beak wide and dry-heaving towards the sand. “There is now so much plastic in our oceans that it reaches the most remote islands on Earth,” says Sir David, as we see the beach strewn with incongruously colourful detritus. The peril the chick is trying to survive is whether or not it can sick up a gobbet of indestructible crud its mother mistook for food.
Space.com
by Ben Turner
Stephen Hawking's most famous prediction could mean that everything in the universe is doomed to evaporate, new study says
Stephen Hawking's most famous theory about black holes has just been given a sinister update — one that proclaims that everything in the universe is doomed to evaporate.
In 1974, Hawking proposed that black holes eventually evaporate by losing what's now known as Hawking radiation — a gradual draining of energy in the form of light particles that spring up around black holes' immensely powerful gravitational fields. Now, a new update to the theory has suggested that Hawking radiation isn't just created by stealing energy from black holes, but from all objects with enough mass.
If the theory is true, it means that everything in the universe will eventually disappear, its energy slowly bled from it in the form of light.
Big Think
by Bobby Azarian
The case for why our Universe may be a giant neural network
- The concept of a brain-like Universe — seeded by pre-Socratic philosopher Anaxagoras — is gaining currency.
- The cosmos looks remarkably similar to the complete wiring diagram of the brain — and “non-local connections” could enable computation.
- Stephen Hawking saw a path to a new philosophy of physics based on a view of the Universe as a self-organizing entity.
Discover Magazine
by Matt Hrodey
A Damaging Hand Disease Has Neanderthal Roots
Fascia, the fibrous connective tissue that literally holds the body together, is one of the unsung heroes of human anatomy. The stringy, white substance – which is basically sheets of connective tissue held together with collagen – cinches together your muscles and organs so they can act as a unified whole.
On the palms of your hands, fascia has an important job, which is to create a rugged surface suitable for gripping. Without it, skin would slide around over bones, muscles and blood vessels, making it difficult, if not painful, to hold onto anything.
[…] In the case of Dupuytren’s disease, the fascia slowly thickens and contracts, forming nodules and eventually cords of tissue that pull the fingers inward, trapping them. And in a recent scientific study, we may now know where the disease came from.
Big Think
by Ethan Siegel
The periodic table you grew up with is wrong
- The elements of the periodic table are sorted by their elemental properties, defined by the number of protons in the nucleus and the bonds formed by their electron structures.
- Up until the early 2000s, we thought that the heaviest stable element was bismuth: the 83rd entry on the periodic table.
- However, we recently learned that bismuth is inherently unstable, and decays after ~10^19 years. Are lead and the other heavy elements truly stable, or if we wait long enough, will everything eventually decay?
The Conversation
by Evangeline Mantzioris
Do you need to rinse rice before cooking? Here’s the science
Rice is a staple food for billions of people in Asia and Africa. It’s also a versatile ingredient for many iconic dishes from around the world, including dolmades from Greece, risottos from Italy, paella from Spain and rice puddings from the United Kingdom.
Despite its universal appeal, the question asked in every kitchen, be it a professional one or your own home, is whether you should pre-wash (or rinse) your rice before cooking.
What do chefs and cooks say?
Electrek
by Peter Johnson
Toyota claims solid-state EV battery tech breakthrough could offer +900 miles driving range
At a recently held technical briefing, Toyota revealed plans for several new technologies, including next-gen EV batteries, aerodynamic drag reduction, and manufacturing upgrades to help transform the company in the electric era. After discovering a breakthrough, Toyota says it aims to offer solid-state state EV batteries that could potentially offer over 900 miles driving range.
Several Toyota executives spoke at the event, explaining the automaker’s upcoming EV tech strategy with concepts that are under development.
Big Think
by Tom Brinkhof
The unsolved mystery of Europe’s oldest language
- The Basque language, also known as Euskara, is unique in Europe.
- Linguistically, it bears no resemblance to the Indo-European tongues that pepper the continent.
- Though its origins remain ambiguous, its prominent role in Basque society is clear.
Live Science
by Tom Metcalfe
Top-secret special-ops submarine from World War II discovered after 20-year search
The wreck of a British World War II submarine that helped usher in the era of special military operations has been found off the coast of Greece, where it sank in 1942.
Veteran Greek diver Kostas Thoctarides announced in a Facebook post last week that his team had discovered the wreck of HMS Triumph in the Aegean Sea, at an undisclosed location "ten of kilometers" off Cape Sounion and at a depth of about 666 feet (203 meters.)
The wreck's closed hatches and retracted periscope indicate that the sub was diving when it sank, Thoctarides said.
Grist
by Amanda Yoder
The hidden costs of gasoline
A black, electric-powered Nissan Leaf pulled up to a gas station — not to fuel up, of course. Matthew Metz, the founder of Coltura, a nonprofit trying to speed up the country’s shift away from gasoline, climbed out of his car with printed maps in hand, prepared to give me a tour.
It was a sunny spring day, and the Arco station in North Seattle looked like any other on a busy street corner, with cars fueling up and a line of bored people waiting to buy snacks and drinks inside the convenience store. Metz knows a lot about gas stations, and it changes what he sees. Looking around, he marveled at the risks that everyone was taking, even if they weren’t aware of it. “This is a hazardous materials facility,” he told me.
[…]
Leaks can occur at any point — in the storage tank itself, in the gas pumps, and in the pipes that connect them. Hazardous chemicals can then spread rapidly through the soil, seeping into groundwater, lakes, or rivers. Even a dribble can pollute a wide area. Ten gallons of gasoline can contaminate 12 million gallons of groundwater — a significant risk, given that groundwater is the source of drinking water for nearly half of all Americans.
As a result, time-consuming cleanup efforts are unfolding all across the country, with remediation for a single gas station sometimes topping $1 million. Leaks are such a huge liability that they’ve led to a high-stakes game of hot potato, where no one wants to pay for the mess — not the gas station owners, not the insurance companies that provide coverage for tanks, not the oil companies that supply the fuel.
Aeon
by Kings and Things
See the Mediterranean as it was captured in some of the earliest surviving photographs
A scholar, artist and heir to a considerable fortune, Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey set off from his native France in 1842 for a tour of the historic archeology of the Eastern Mediterranean. But, more than just an eager sightseer, Girault de Prangey planned to capture such famed structures as the Acropolis in Athens and the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem via daguerreotype – the world’s first publicly accessible photographic process – with the intent of publishing and selling his images. These pictures, as well as the additional street scenes and cityscapes he would capture along the way, would eventually become historic in their own right, in some cases representing the oldest surviving photographs of the places depicted. However, as this video essay from the YouTube channel Kings and Things details, these remarkable images would go almost entirely unseen until the 1920s, some three decades after Girault de Prangey’s death. Inviting viewers to retrace this photographer’s footsteps, the video presents a riveting window onto the Eastern Mediterranean as it existed nearly two centuries ago, at the dawn of the photographic age.