Daniel Lemire: Science and Technology links (July 31st 2021)

• Researchers built a microscope that might be 10 times better than the best available microscopes.

• Subsidizing college education can lower earnings due to lower job experience:

The Post 9/11 GI Bill (PGIB) is among the largest and most generous college subsidies enacted thus far in the U.S. (…) the introduction of the PGIB raised college enrollment by 0.17 years and B.A. completion by 1.2 percentage points. But, the PGIB reduced average annual earnings nine years after separation from the Army.

• Better looking academics have more successful careers. If the current pandemic reduces in-person meetings, it could be that this effect might become weaker?

• It appears that women frequently rape men:

(…) male rape happens about as often as female rape, and possibly exceeds it. Evidence also shows that 80% of those who rape men are women.

• In the past, Greenland experienced several sudden warming episodes by as much as 16 degrees, without obvious explanation.

• Researchers took stem cells, turned them into ovarian follicles, and ended up with viable mice offsprings. Maybe such amazing technology could come to a fertility clinic near your one day.

• We may soon benefit from a breakthrough that allows us to grow rice and potatoes with 50% more yield.

• American trucks sold today are often longer than military tanks used in the second world war.

• Organic food may not be better:

If England and Wales switched 100 per cent to organic it would actually increase the greenhouse gas emissions associated with our food supply because of the greater need for imports. Scaling up organic agriculture might also put at risk the movement’s core values in terms of promoting local, fresh produce and small family farms.

• You can transmit data at over 300 terabits per second over the Internet.

Not only have the researchers in Japan blown the 2020 record out of the proverbial water, but they’ve done so with a novel engineering method capable of integrating into modern-day fiber optic infrastructure with minimal effort.

It suggests that we are far away from upper limits in our everyday Internet use and that there are still fantastic practical breakthroughs to come. What could you do with a nearly infinite data bandwidth?

• We are using robots to sculpt marble.

• Nuclear fusion might bring unlimited energy supplies. It seems that we might be close to a practical breakthrough.

• We still do not know why human females have permanent large breasts.

• It is unclear whether influenza vaccines are effective.

• Some ants effectively never age, because of a parasite living in them.