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Geoguessing
Did you know that there are competitions surrounding identifying a certain geographic, location, a.k.a.geoguessing? Like, could you identify a location in 30 seconds based on a single image?
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Covid altering immune systems?
One idea is that Covid may be altering our immune systems.
Malgorzata Gasperowicz, a Calgary based developmental biologist, says that if immunity debt fully explained rising infection counts we’d expect to see a uniform rebound across all pathogens. But we don’t, she says.
For instance, a 2024 study of more than 4000 viral cases from Ontario, Canada,4 found higher rates of bacterial infections in people recovering from covid-19 than in those recovering from influenza or RSV—although study groups weren’t perfectly matched by age or clinical setting, limiting direct comparisons.
Jeimy says that many infants and toddlers admitted to hospital with rare infections since 2022 weren’t yet born when pandemic restrictions were in place, and they therefore couldn’t be experiencing immunity debt. They were, however, likely exposed to SARS-CoV-2.
Wolfgang Leitner, chief of the Innate Immunity Section at the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), speculates that covid-19 may somehow impair the immune system’s “memory” of past infections, potentially making even healthy people more vulnerable to future pathogens. He wonders whether the virus leaves lasting scars on the immune system’s T cell defences. “But that’s just (my) hypothesis,” he emphasises in an email.
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Will o the wisps explained
We may finally have a full explanation into how will ‘o wisps work. We knew methane and other swamp gasses were involved, but how did they ignite?
As with the static electricity produced by stroking hair, fur, or carpet in the right conditions, the microlightning results from a buildup of opposing charges until the field created is strong enough to make them leap a gap.
High-speed imaging reveals the source of the charge as the surface of tiny bubbles of methane, which become either positively or negatively charged as they move through water, split, and combine. The charge concentration appears to survive the bubbles’ escape to the air. When the spark jumps the gap between a neighboring positive and negatively charged bubble, it leads to non-thermal oxidation, releasing energy from the chemical reaction between methane and oxygen, but mostly as blue-violet light rather than heat.
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AI for science research
Dr. Agarwal is among more than 20 researchers who have left their work at Meta, OpenAI, Google DeepMind and other big A.I. projects in recent weeks to join a new Silicon Valley start-up, Periodic Labs. Many of them have given up tens of millions of dollars — if not hundreds of millions — to make the move.
As the A.I. labs chase amorphous goals like superintelligence and a similar concept called artificial general intelligence, Periodic is focused on building A.I technology that can accelerate new scientific discoveries in areas like physics and chemistry.
“The main objective of A.I. is not to automate white-collar work,” said Liam Fedus, one of the start-up’s founders. “The main objective is to accelerate science.”
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Playing SimCity 2000 as adult
SimCity 2000 was a fun sandbox game as a kid, and looking back, building an airport first wasn’t a good choice. Ars Technia played the game with an adult lens.
Can I live my values by sparing some money in a tight budget for homeless shelters or anti-smoking initiatives? Should I trust my police captain when he says crime is out of control, or should I wonder if he’s just protecting his own livelihood? Do I really want to spend more money and land space on solar power plants, or is a little pollution from the cheaper coal plant worth the trade-off?
While these kinds of decisions plague me now in a way they never did as a child, the trade-offs I don’t have to make in SimCity 2000 also stand out. If I want to build a train line in SimCity 2000, I can literally pause time and just drag the tracks across the entirety of downtown. Here in the real world of suburban DC, I’ve watched as construction of the Purple Line light rail has dragged on outside my window for years, snarling traffic and running up costs in the process.
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Closed captions are all the rage
For various reasons is it any surprise closed captioning keeps growing in popularity?
The poll suggests many young adults use subtitles because they are watching in noisy environments, whereas older adults choose them to better hear or understand what is being said.
That makes sense to David Barber, a sound editor and mixer and president of the Motion Picture Sound Editors.
“Part of it is cultural,” Barber says. “What the younger kids are doing is, a lot of them will multitask. They’ll listen to music while they’re watching a show. So they’re catching bits and pieces of this, bits and pieces of that. I think they probably are half-listening and half-watching. It’s an interesting phenomenon.”
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A school in Kentucky banned phones. And the kids started talking to each other
A school in Kentucky banned phones. Unsurprisingly, they interacted more, and surprisingly, library circulation went up.
“There is definitely a different feeling,” Neuss said. “It’s hard to quantify something like that. But it’s noticeable when you talk with students, walk through the hallways and go into classes.”
What is easier to quantify is the immediate impact of the ban on students’ use of the school library. In the first month of school this year, students took out 67 percent more books than the same month last year, with 533 books checked out in August 2024 and 891 books checked out in August 2025. That’s for a student body of 2,189.
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A conservative concentration of media power
Margaret Sullivan with an astute and sobering take on the consolidation of conservative media power:
In 2020, only a tiny fraction of Americans got news from TikTok. These days, that number has soared to one in five.
For young adults, those figures are much higher, with almost half of adults under 30 getting news there, according to the Pew Research Center.
But who will own that hugely influential purveyor of information?
As with so much of American media – from television networks to some of the largest newspapers – the answer is shaping up to be as simple and short as a TikTok video: the ultra-rich.
As President Trump moved this week to clear the path to sell the platform’s US assets to a group of American investors, the metastasizing reality of media-by-oligarchy threatened to become even more extreme.
