Interesting Links: May 13, 2019
Bone marrow transplants interfere with aging; Blue Origin's lunar lander; Microsoft as an open source company; the brain's executive function; and more...
Business, News, Science, Technology, or whatever gets my attention.
Straight from my RSS feed:
Ten links and micro-summaries from my 1000+ daily headlines. I filter them so you don't have to.
- How your brain's executive function works -- and how to improve it - Sabine Doebel's TED talk describes her research with children and how it demonstrates the importance of context in order to make the best use of our intelligence. She extrapolates from that to offer strategies for adults to improve our own brains' executive processing. Strategies include surrounding ourselves with peers who we like and who share our goals, or altering our environments to improve our focus and motivation - by putting our cell phones out of reach, for example.
- Extension of Maximal Lifespan and High Bone Marrow Chimerism After Nonmyeloablative Syngeneic Transplantation of Bone Marrow From Young to Old Mice - Researchers have already shown that "radiation free bone marrow transplantation slows aging." Now, a new study examines the effect in mice by performing the transplant at an age when half the population has already died of old age (roughly equivalent to 75 years in humans). Under these circumstances, they found that they boosted the post transplant maximum life span by ~28% and survival time from the beginning of the experiment by a factor of about ~2.8. The authors conclude that bone marrow transplants affect the intrinsic aging mechanisms, and that the extension in survivability was accompanied by an extension of an active and healthy period of life. h/t Daniel Lemire
- Blue Origin Unveils “Blue Moon,” Its Big Lunar Lander - The company revealed a life sized mock-up of its lander and said that it could be ready to carry humans to the moon by 2024. A human crewed mission would be preceded by unmanned missions carrying rovers and other large payloads to the moon's surface. The company's web site says Blue Moon, "has been designed to land an ascent vehicle that will allow us to return Americans to the moon by 2024."
- Microsoft: The open source company - In addition to the widely publicized announcement of Microsoft adding a full Linux kernel in its Windows Subsystem for Linux, Microsoft has also open-sourced its Windows Terminal, including the source code for its important conhost.exe program, and even the Windows Calculator. According to the article, this may signal a long term direction towards open-sourcing more aspects of the Windows platform.
- Teens are using these shopping apps to get rich - ThredUP, Goat, Depop, Poshmark, and StockX. These apps make it easy to buy and sell, so entrepreneurial teens are using them to make thousands of dollars selling second-hand goods.
- What’s Holding Back Bitcoin in Venezuela? This Group Is Investigating - Bitcoin is mainly being used for freelance earnings, savings, and remittances. Other currencies like dash suffer from liquidity problems. And because the government is forcing merchants to accept bolivars, "No one wants [the bolivar] but people need it to survive."
- A new way to build tiny neural networks could create powerful AI on your phone - From the article: "within every neural network exists a far smaller one that can be trained to achieve the same performance as its oversize parent.". Some early configurations lead to trainable networks, others don't. The traditional approach to dealing with this has been to prune after finding the stable networks, but now researchers are pruning the early configurations and reusing them prior to training. It is hoped that a database will emerge containing the starting configurations and the list of tasks that they're good for.
- A New Study Claims Facebook Is Unknowingly Generating Terror Content - According to the article, "“Facebook’s efforts to stamp out terror content have been weak and ineffectual," and it is even auto-generating content for pages like an al-Qaeda page that had 7,410 likes.
- STEEM Scientists Create Dry Sand Bubbles - @ribbitingscience reports that scientists have demonstrated the ability of light-weight sand particles to rise above heavy ones with the application of vertical vibration and an upward gas flow. Termed, Rayleigh–Taylor (RT) instability, this is the first time that the liquid-like bubbling behavior has been observed in solids. The discovery has potential application in geography as well as practical applications in pharmaceuticals, energy, and construction industries. (5% of this post's rewards will go to @ribbitingscience)
- STEEM Honeyminer Now Available for MacOS! - I don't use MacOS, but I do use Honeyminer, so this may be of interest to any readers who are running MacOS. As described in the post, it lets you use your CPU or GPU to mine altcoins and get paid in bitcoin (BTC). (@whalereports will receive 5% of this post's rewards)
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