Winding Down
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net, technology and science news
by Alan Lenton
5 January 2020
Welcome back! Another issue of Winding Down – the first of 2020 hits the digital presses! For this issue we have a wide variety of stuff for you to read and look at, starting with a piece on chemistry, then we look at a plague of drones, electric vehicles and noise (or lack of it), scientific/medical ethics, and a brilliant graphic about ocean depths. Pictures feature shots of building a transatlantic liner in the 1930s and some amazing science animations . Our quote this week is from security and encryption guru Bruce Schneier. (He literally wrote the book on encryption – I can see a copy of it on my bookshelf while sitting here at my desk!)
Scanner has URLs pointing to material on the measles epidemic in Samoa, malaria eradication, Apple computer repairs, scientific achievements of the last decade (my only concession to the fact that we are just starting a new decade), cloud security, fibre optic cables as earthquake detectors, life expectancy in the USA, and finally a slightly belated warning about the lousy security of internet connected children’s toys.
Credits: Thanks to readers Barb and Fi for drawing my attention to material for Winding Down.
Chemistry:
One of the problems for research chemists is that things often happen too fast to see what’s going on. You know what you put in. You know what you got out. But what happened in between is often difficult to tell. In particular the question of was there an intermediate step involving the creation of very short lived substances, or did the components just swap atoms.
One way of trying to see what is going on is to slow things down by performing experiments at a low – some times very low – temperature, which slows down the movement of molecules. The colder, the slower.
That’s exactly what scientists at Harvard did, and they were able for the first time to see what happens when two molecules of potassium-rubidium collide.
They already knew that the end result is two molecules, one made of two atoms of rubidium, and one made of two atoms of potassium. What they didn’t know until they ran the experiment at a temperature of just above absolute zero was that a four atom intermediate is formed which then splits into the two pairs that form the final result of the interaction.
This means that we can study chemical reaction in much more detail, which could in turn lead to new applications in fields like energy and pharmaceuticals.
https://newatlas.com/science/coldest-chemical-reaction-harvard/
Drones:
The good citizens of Colorado and Nebraska have been seeing things in the sky at night. And, no, it’s not mass hallucination or a Roswell transplant. It seems that someone is using swarms of up to thirty drones each as big as six feet across, quartering the sky.
No one knows who is running the drones, or exactly what they are doing, except that they appear to be flying a search grid pattern. All the obvious candidates are denying owning them, but thirty large drones don’t come cheap. No one appears to have shot one down yet, but I suspect that’s just a matter of time, and then, maybe, all will be revealed!
https://www.sciencealert.com/mysterious-swarms-of-giant-drones-keep-appearing-at-night-over-colorado
Electric vehicles:
With more electric vehicles on the road a new problem is gradually starting to manifest itself – silent running! I suspect the majority of urban dwellers really don’t know just how much they rely on being able to hear approaching vehicles – especially in countries like the UK where there are no laws against ‘jaywalking’.
Mostly people rely on engine noise, although there is some tyre noise, but not very much in modern vehicles, so electric cars tend to be audibly ‘invisible’. It seems that here in London and the UK this has already become a problem for those with impaired vision. It’s a big enough problem, in fact, that London Transport is already experimenting with fitting electric buses with ‘noise makers’.
Indeed, there is regulation in the works to require all ‘quiet’ vehicles to generate some sort of sound from September 2021. I guess we’ve come a long way since the days when noise and lack of quiet was considered to be a major problem in modern cities!
https://londonist.com/london/transport/tfl-buses-trialling-new-safety-sound
Ethics:
The Chinese scientist responsible for gene editing babies has been sentenced to three years imprisonment. On the face of it, that seems appropriate, if a little on the low side.
But this is the Chinese government we are talking about, and things are never so simple over there. I’m left wondering whether the real crime was publicly blabbing about something which the government was turning a blind eye to, and maybe even encouraging with the Chinese equivalent of a wink and a nod.
https://www.sciencealert.com/chinese-scientist-has-been-sentenced-to-three-years-jail-for-gene-editing-babies
Oceans:
Few people really have much grasp of just how deep the oceans are. But finally I’ve seen a graphic depiction which really does help people to get a feel for it. It’s by Neal Agarwal, who deserves some sort of award for it! Many years ago I did a one year course on Oceanography at the UK’s Open University, so I’m not exactly ignorant on the subject, but even I learned a lot from this graphic!
Highly recommended...
https://neal.fun/deep-sea/
Pictures:
Our first set of pictures of the year hark back to the 1930s and the great liners that sailed the Atlantic between North America and Europe. It’s a series of pictures of the liner ‘Queen Mary’ being built. The pictures are interesting as some fine examples of a 1930s engineering project. However, what I found really fascinating was the fields next to the then state of the art ship building. The fields were still being ploughed by horse drawn ploughs, and seeded by hand!
https://www.considerable.com/entertainment/retronaut/constructing-queen-mary/
Those of you who can remember the home computers of the 1980s can probably remember the GIF picture format. It was eventually replaced by png and jpg formats because the compression technique used by GIF was patented (which has long since expired). One of the attractions of the GIF format was an ability to do looping animations. I was aware that a few Japanese artists used this facility in some of their art, but until now, I didn’t realise that GIF animations were also popular among scientists for making animations of their work!
So, here, courtesy of Scientific American Magazine, are some of the best, and most beautiful, GIF animations of the last year. My fav? The electric blue branching neurons!
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/here-are-the-most-beautiful-science-gifs-we-discovered-in-2019/
Quotes:
“Let me be clear. None of us who favour strong encryption is saying that child exploitation isn’t a serious crime, or a worldwide problem. We’re not saying that about kidnapping, international drug cartels, money laundering, or terrorism. We are saying three things. One, that strong encryption is necessary for personal and national security. Two, that weakening encryption does more harm than good. And three, law enforcement has other avenues for criminal investigation than eavesdropping on communications and stored devices (this https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/10/dark_web_site_t.html is just one example).
So let’s have reasoned policy debates about encryption – debates that are informed by technology. And let’s stop it with the scare stories.”
– Bruce Schneier (via LWN.net newsletter)
Scanner:
The measles epidemic in Samoa is so bad, unvaccinated homes are being marked with red
https://www.sciencealert.com/the-measles-epidemic-in-samoa-is-so-bad-unvaccinated-homes-are-being-marked-with-red
In country after country, one of the world’s deadliest diseases is being eradicated. In many cases, it’s women leading the fight.
https://reasonstobecheerful.world/tchau-tchau-malaria/
We lose money on repairs, sobs penniless Apple, even though we charge y’all a fortune
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/11/21/apple_repair_costs/
The 5 most ground breaking scientific achievements of the decade
https://newatlas.com/science/most-groundbreaking-scientific-achievements-decade/
How online ‘cloud buckets’ are exposing private photos and other sensitive data
https://www.euronews.com/2019/12/29/how-online-cloud-buckets-are-exposing-private-photos-other-sensitive-n1105056
We know this sounds weird but in future we could ask fibre optic cables: Did the earth move for you... literally?
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/12/05/fiber_optic_cables_earthquake/
US life expectancy drops for the third straight year in alarming reality check
https://www.sciencealert.com/life-expectancy-in-the-us-just-declined-for-the-third-year-straight
Beware of bad Santas this Xmas: Piles of insecure smart toys fill retailers’ shelves
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/12/11/top_toys_still_toppled_by_security_testing/
Footnote
Please send suggestions for stories to alan@ibgames.com and include the words Winding Down in the subject line, unless you want your deathless prose gobbled up by my voracious Thunderbird spam filter...
Alan Lenton
alan@ibgames.com
5 January 2020
Alan Lenton is an on-line games designer, programmer and sociologist, the order of which depends on what he is currently working on! His web site is at http://www.ibgames.net/alan/index.html.
Past issues of Winding Down can be found at http://www.ibgames.net/alan/winding/index.html.
If you have any questions or comments about the articles on my web site, click here to send me email.