The Sci-Tech Stash

Publications worth reading:

• Smithsonian Magazine: History, Travel, Arts, Science, People, Places
• Phys.org — News and Articles on Science and Technology
• Quanta Magazine | Science and Math News
• The Verge: the intersection of technology, science, art, and culture
• Low←Tech Magazine, Doubts on progress and technology

Last but not least, HandWiki — a wiki encyclopedia of science, technology and computing.

See also: the climate collection, as well as links tagged science and tech.

Highlights

• Mechanical Watch (4 May 2022) How they really work on the inside — via Lawrence Tratt
• What Is A Wankel Engine And How Does It Work? (20 January 2022)
• How to Grow Sodium Chloride Crystals at Home (10 November 2021)

Engineering

• Guerrilla guide to CNC machining, mold making, and resin casting
• Desmos: a free online graphing calculator

Statistics

• When U.S. air force discovered the flaw of averages (16 January 2016)

Transportation

• Starliner faced “catastrophic” failure before software bug found (February 2020)
• Elon Musk Says ‘Hyperloop’ Tunnel Is Now Just a Normal Car Tunnel Because ‘This Is Simple and Just Works’ (25 May 2019)

What do cars and ships have in common? You have to steer them:

• The Navy Installed Touch-screen Steering Systems To Save Money. Ten Sailors Paid With Their Lives (20 December 2019)
• Why Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles (20 February 2019)

Speaking of which:

Shipping disaster

• The herald of disaster, or why you should welcome regulations (7 May 2017)
• Normalization of Deviance (14 February 2014)

Physics

So, decision makers are willing to do this because it's too complicated for computers, but still won't drop DST after years of public outcry? It's as if, wait for it, science isn't in the service of people and never was.

A Centuries-Old Physics Mystery? Solved (6 October 2021)

Technion researchers have found an effective solution to the famous age-old, three-body problem in physics.

Thirty years of ‘against measurement’ (2 December 2020)

Despite its many successes, physicists are still struggling to nail down a coherent interpretation of quantum mechanics, as it best represents “reality”. Jim Baggott explores the arguments first put forth by John Bell three decades ago, and looks at theoretical and experimental evidence accumulated since

In other news:

• Goodbye Aberration: Physicist Solves 2,000-Year-Old Optical Problem (5 July 2019)
• NIST Quantum Refrigerator Offers Extreme Cooling and Convenience (5 March 2013)
• Quantum gas goes below absolute zero (3 January 2013)

And some really old stuff:

• The frame rate of the universe (16 January 2009)
• Earth: An Oscillator and Frequency Standard (14 July 2005)

Material science

• The Superconductor Sensation Has Fizzled, and That’s Fine (14 August 2023) The rise and fall of LK-99 offers a lesson on how to consider technology’s role in urgently needed energy transitions
• Plastic recycling is a minefield. Here's why it's so difficult and how we can make it easier (26 July 2023)
• Riddle solved: Why was Roman concrete so durable? (6 January 2023) An unexpected ancient manufacturing strategy may hold the key to designing concrete that lasts for millennia.
• MIT Engineers Create the “Impossible” – New Material That Is Stronger Than Steel and As Light as Plastic (16 April 2022)
• Stone paper (23 August 2021)
• A New Metal Foam Is as Bulletproof as Heavy Steel Armor, Researchers Say (6 June 2019)
• Is Glass a Liquid or a Solid? (1 February 2019)
• What’s the deal with transparent aluminum? (3 April 2018)
• Blackest is the new black: Scientists have developed a material so dark that you can't see it... (13 July 2014)
• Micro 3D Printer Creates Tiny Structures in Seconds (5 March 2013)

Robots and AI

Robot mistakes man for box of peppers, kills him (9 November 2023) Malfunctioning sensor system blamed for technician's death at Korean food plant

Ghost Robotics unveils autonomous robot dog armed with assault rifle (15 October 2021) You... realize ED-209 was showing you what not to do, right, tech manufacturers? That was the whole damn point.

Children Beating Up Robot Inspires New Escape Maneuver System (6 August 2015) What scares me is that none of those researchers seems to know the first thing about bullying. There's no mention of it; no awareness of the issue, or the psychology behind it. Nothing. Didn't they ask anyone with actual knowledge of child behavior? (Via Slashdot).

Paleontology

• Oldest fortresses in the world discovered (7 December 2023)

All the hominins made tools (3 December 2023) A study of associations between stone tool evidence and fossil hominin remains shows that a wide range of species made stone artifacts.

• 27,000-year-old Pendants made from giant sloths suggest earlier arrival of people in the Americas (23 July 2023)

Archaeologists Discover 1.2 Million-Year-Old 'Workshop' in Mind-Blowing Find (27 January 2023) The discovery pushes the timeline of obsidian tool use back by an astonishing 500,000 years.

Discovery of Turkish 11,400-year-old village challenges ideas of when and why humans first settled down (17 November 2021) Excavations at monumental site Karahan Tepe, near the Turkish-Syrian border, suggest that society was established before the dawn of agriculture

The White Sands discovery only confirms what Indigenous people have said all along (24 September 2021) Turns out, Native Americans have been there for even longer than recently extended estimates.

• Just 7 percent of our DNA is unique to modern humans, study shows (16 July 2021)
• Earliest evidence for humans in the Americas (22 July 2020)
• Neanderthal glue was a bigger deal than we thought (22 October 2019)
• World's oldest yarn fragment shows Neanderthals were smarter than we thought (9 April 2020)
• This 7,000-year-old well is the oldest wooden structure ever discovered, archeologists say (17 February 2020)
• These may be the world’s first images of dogs—and they’re wearing leashes (16 November 2017)
• How To Kill A Dinosaur In 10 Minutes (7 August 2017)
• How to Really Eat Like a Hunter-Gatherer: Why the Paleo Diet Is Half-Baked (3 June 2013)

And some really old ones:

• Human Ancestors Were Nearly All Vegetarians (23 July 2012)
• Neanderthals, Humans Interbred—First Solid DNA Evidence (8 May 2010)
• Study: Neanderthals Wore Jewelry And Makeup (10 January 2010)

Demographics

• You can’t even pay people to have more kids (27 November 2023) These countries tried everything from cash to patriotic calls to duty to reverse drastically declining birth rates. It didn’t work.
• The Yuxi Circle: The World’s Most Densely Populated Area (8 April 2022)
• Number of babies born in Japan in 2018 lowest since records began; population decline the highest (21 December 2018)
• The Changing Nature of the American Household (3 September 2013)

Space

Highlights

• I wrote the book on warp drive. No, we didn’t accidentally create a warp bubble. (9 December 2021)
• NSF begins planning for decommissioning of Arecibo Observatory’s 305-meter telescope due to safety concerns (19 November 2020)
• Happy birthday, Cosmonaut Valentina! (6 March 2014)

Reference

• An Atlas of The Universe
• Atomic Rocketships of the Space Patrol
• Delta Vee Map
• Explosive Decompression and Vacuum Exposure
• Hypervelocity impacts and protecting spacecraft

Space probes

• How Is Voyager Still Talking After All These Years? (8 June 2022)
• Engineers Investigating NASA’s Voyager 1 Telemetry Data (18 May 2022)
• See The First Images NASA’s Juno Took As It Sailed By Ganymede (8 June 2021)
• New Horizons spacecraft 'alters theory of planet formation' (13 February 2020)
• NASA brings Voyager 2 fully back online, 11.5 billion miles from Earth (7 February 2020)
• New Horizons Kuiper Belt Flyby Object Officially Named 'Arrokoth' (12 November 2019)
• Images from Cassini's final targeted flyby of Saturn's Moon Rhea (12 March 2013)

Moon

• Earth’s Atmosphere Extends Way Beyond The Moon (14 June 2021)

The Moon Is Rusting, and Researchers Want to Know Why (2 September 2020); can't help but notice that the data was collected by Indian and Japanese space probes, then analyzed by NASA. Missing from the picture: the European Space Agency. When was the last time we did anything except launch commercial satellites?

• What SOFIA’s discovery of water on the Moon is, and isn’t (27 October 2020)

And a trio of articles occasioned by the anniversary of the first Moon landing:

• Reflections on a Space Race (21 July 2019)
• An Elegiac Moon Landing Anniversary (20 July 2019)
• 50 Years After Apollo 11: Where's Our Moon City? (18 July 2019)

In our dreams, where it belongs. Dream all you want, our life is down here.

Health

Plaidophile: On chronic pain (21 June 2018)

Highights

• Is Sunscreen the New Margarine? (10 January 2019)
• Poor Human Olfaction is a Nineteenth Century Myth (12 May 2017)
• Has our war on microbes left our immune systems prone to dysfunction? (14 October 2012)

Hazards

See also: Tips for cold (21 January 2019)

• XKCD: Radiation
• Barometric Pressure vs. Altitude Table
• American Public Health Association - Leading Causes of Unintentional and Intentional Injury Mortality: United States, 2000–2009

Pandemic

See also: regular coverage in Science.

• Masks for COVID: Updating the evidence (4 July 2022)
• COVID-19: stigmatising the unvaccinated is not justified (20 November 2021)
• COVID vaccines effective but household transmission of delta a risk for 1 in 4 (28 October 2021)
• Immune-mediated hepatitis with the Moderna vaccine, no longer a coincidence but confirmed. (4 October 2021)
• Increases in COVID-19 are unrelated to levels of vaccination across 68 countries and 2947 counties in the United States (30 September 2021)
• Doctors: Seattle COVID patient only third in US to be reinfected after recovering (30 September 2020)
• Recovered virus patients retest positive due to 'dead' virus fragments: experts (29 April 2020)
• Iceland has tested more of its population for coronavirus than anywhere else. Here's what it learned (10 April 2020)
• FactChecking the coronavirus (27 January 2020)

Nutrition

• Metabolism in adulthood does not slow as commonly believed, study finds (12 August 2021)

Everything You Know About Obesity Is Wrong (19 September 2018): For decades, the medical community has ignored mountains of evidence to wage a cruel and futile war on fat people, poisoning public perception and ruining millions of lives. It's time for a new paradigm.

• Scientists now think that being overweight can protect your health (17 November 2015)
• Why BMI Is a Big Fat Scam (25 October 2014)

On a related note: 5 Things I Miss About Weighing More Than 300 Pounds (21 March 2014) — yes, it's humor.

Neurology and psychology

• How classic psychology warped our view of human nature as cruel and selfish—but new research is more hopeful (20 July 2023)
• How Parents’ Trauma Leaves Biological Traces in Children (1 July 2022)
• Telling kids they have autism when they are younger may be best (2 May 2022)
• Music, even played softly, saps ability to pay attention (18 February 2022)

Why ADHD Isn't Just for Kids (22 November 2021) ... and how some get better at managing it with age.

• ADHD in adults can be life-threatening when left untreated: experts (17 August 2019)
• Babies may be able to link certain words and concepts, research suggests (20 November 2017)

Lead: America’s Real Criminal Element (February 2016, via Slashdot) The hidden villain behind violent crime, lower IQs, and even the ADHD epidemic.

Study delivers bleak verdict on validity of psychology experiment results (27 August 2015) Of 100 studies published in top-ranking journals in 2008, 75% of social psychology experiments and half of cognitive studies failed the replication test

• Which professions have the most psychopaths? (30 October 2013)
• The lonely life of the farmer too often leads to suicide (28 September 2013)
• Canadian Scientists Create Virtual Human Brain (5 December 2012)

Genetics and cancer

• What are the responsibilities of geneticists? (27 May 2022)
• Biologist Explains Biological Sex (29 January 2020)
• Sex isn’t chromosomes: the story of a century of misconceptions about X & Y (23 February 2015)

Italian Gene Holds Hope for Unclogging Arteries (17 October 1994) A mutant protein found in one family appears to ward off heart disease despite a high-fat diet. Researchers buoyed by animal trials

Vision

• Study: Staring at Deep Red Light Can Improve Naturally Declining Vision (7 July 2020)
• The myopia boom (18 March 2015)