Most Popular Editorials: How to Prove You Know a Secret Without Giving It Away | Quanta Magazine

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How to Prove You Know a Secret Without Giving It Away | Quanta Magazine For a simple way to understand this idea, let's suppose you want to show your friend that you know how to get through a maze, without divulging any details about the path. You could simply traverse the maze within a time limit, while your friend was forbidden from watching. (The time limit is necessary because given enough time, anyone can eventually find their way out through trial and error.) Your friend would know you could do it, but they wouldn't know how.Zero-knowledge proofs are helpful to cryptographers, who work with secret information, but also to researchers of computational complexity, which deals with classifying the difficulty of different problems. "A lot of modern cryptography relies on complexity assumptions — on the assumption that certain problems are hard to solve, so there has always been some connections between the two worlds," said Claude Crépeau, a computer scientist at McGill University. "But [these] proofs have created a whole world of connection." Continued here

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Coffee vs. Tea Smackdown - Which is better? Do you start your mornings with a potent dose of caffeine from a freshly brewed cup of Joe? Or do you prefer a slightly less caffeinated nudge from a warm and gentle cup of tea?Whatever your preference, scientists have found that regularly drinking coffee or tea can provide a variety of health benefits. But how do coffee and tea compare in a head-to-head matchup? We took a look at the research, and here's what we found. Continued here

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Allergic to the world: can medicine help people with severe intolerance to chemicals? Sharon calls herself a universal reactor. In the 1990s, she became allergic to the world, to the mould colonising her home and the paint coating her kitchen walls, but also deodorants, soaps and anything containing plastic. Public spaces rife with artificial fragrances were unbearable. Scented disinfectants and air fresheners in hospitals made visiting doctors torture. The pervasiveness of perfumes and colognes barred her from in-person social gatherings. Even stepping into her own back garden was complicated by the whiff of pesticides and her neighbour’s laundry detergent sailing through the air. When modern medicine failed to identify the cause of Sharon’s illness, exiting society felt like her only solution. She started asking her husband to strip and shower every time he came home. Grandchildren greeted her through a window. When we met for the first time, Sharon had been housebound for more than six years.When I started medical school, the formaldehyde-based solutions used to embalm the cadavers in the human anatomy labs would cause my nose to burn and my eyes to well up – representing the mild, mundane end of a chemical sensitivity spectrum. The other extreme of the spectrum is an environmental intolerance of unknown cause (referred to as idiopathic by doctors) or, as it is commonly known, multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS). An official definition of MCS does not exist because the condition is not recognised as a distinct medical entity by the World Health Organization or the American Medical Association, although it has been recognised as a disability in countries such as Germany and Canada. Continued here

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Healthy, High-Quality Relationships Matter More Than We Think Solomon adds other factors that can come into play, such as a sense of trust and commitment.  “Commitment is essential,” Solomon notes. “That sense that you were here yesterday, you’re here today, you’re going to be here tomorrow. That sense of continuity helps us relax and makes it safe enough to be vulnerable.” Beyond that, the authors of a 2005 study published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships found that those who shifted into more committed relationships over time were rewarded with improvements in their overall well-being. When it comes to our romantic ties, Solomon emphasized there are physical and emotional health benefits that come with a rewarding relationship; in other words, when there’s emotional safety and physical connectedness between partners. And according to authors of another study published in the Cognitive Therapy and Research journal, close, supportive relationships can be crucial for dealing with stress.  Continued here

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3 Ways to Reprioritize Your Work Life for a Hybrid World The world has reopened with a vengeance. Instead of toggling between Zoom, Google Meet, and Teams, we now run among aforementioned platforms and galas, commutes, parent-teacher meetings, conferences, and the block party. If you can’t make something, don’t worry—of course there’s a virtual option. Earbuds must be plentiful in the return to some semblance of normality; excuses are not.The last two years democratized meetings in a multitude of ways, as screens leveled “turf” (no your office vs mine, nobody at the head of the table) and opened access (think daily check-ins and more intentional meetings). But you don’t want to feel “prisoner to your calendar,” as Khe Hy often points out in his RadReads blog that covers the intersection of work and productivity, among other topics. Continued here

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How green are biofuels? Scientists are at loggerheads Tyler Lark, a geographer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, grew up among farms, working on a neighbor’s dairy, vaguely aware of the tension between clearing land to grow food and preserving nature. As an engineering student working on water projects in Haiti, he saw an extreme version of that conflict: forests cleared for firewood or to grow crops, producing soil erosion, environmental denudation and worsening poverty. “I think it was that experience that told me, ‘Hey, land use is important,’” he says.He decided to study how farmers transform landscapes through their collective decisions to plow up grasslands, clear trees or drain wetlands — decisions that lie at the heart of some of the planet’s greatest environmental challenges, and also provoke controversy. Lark carries professional scars from recently stumbling into one of the fiercest of these fights: the debate over growing crops that are used to make fuel for cars and trucks. Continued here

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When a Country's Cuisine Becomes a Cultural Export "WE GOT STRAWBERRY, ginseng, love that kimchi," the Wonder Girls, a now disbanded K-pop group, half-sing, half-cheer on their 2011 single "K-Food Party." "Keep the skin so beautiful and full of energy." This was hardly a spontaneous ode to the ingredients and dishes of their motherland; South Korea's Ministry for Food, Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries had recruited the young women as global ambassadors, part of a government-sponsored campaign announced three years before with the mission of elevating Korean food to the highest ranks of the world's favorite cuisines. How exactly this would be measured was unclear. Proposed benchmarks - to be achieved by 2017 - included quadrupling the number of Korean restaurants overseas, with those already existing to be sent a recipe manual encouraging standardization of Korean food name spellings (e.g., "kimchi" versus "kimchee" versus "gimchi"), the easier for befuddled foreigners to remember. Continued here

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Aretha Franklin Was Tracked By the FBI for 40 Years. Here's What's In Her File Franklin’s FBI file — first requested in via the Freedom of Information Act on Aug. 17, 2018 —  is 270 pages long, peppered with phrases like “Black extremists,” “pro-communist,” “hate America,” “radical,” “racial violence,” and “militant Black power” and overflowing with suspicion about the singer, her work, and the other activists and entertainers with whom she she spent time. Some documents are heavily redacted and others indicate that there may be additional materials in the FBI’s possession. Rolling Stone has requested the FBI make available any and all additional records.Franklin’s work on behalf of civil rights and her association with Martin Luther King Jr., Angela Davis, and other social justice revolutionaries, became a preoccupation of the FBI, with the singer’s addresses, phone numbers and activities regularly tracked by agents, according to the documents obtained by Rolling Stone. Along with all the surveillance, the FBI documents contain letters and reports of death threats against  Franklin. In 1974, for example, she received this ominous letter, “Dear Aretha…I’m still in charge of you…I’m not to be crossed…you should be…paying me some of my money…evidently your advisors do not know the dangers of neglecting what I’m saying…I would hate to drag [your father] into this.”  Continued here

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Instagram Food Is Having a Vibe Shift For a long time, food looked one way on Instagram. It was the look of crisp, pristinely lit plates seen from above, with sprigs of herbs strewn to appear haphazard, despite the tedious work of styling tweezers; stacks of pancakes and cookies shot at exactly the correct angle to show a blur of eggs, old-timey glass bottles of milk, and an “accidental” dusting of flour in the background.I’ve been noticing something, though: This type of content isn’t doing as well as it used to. Big Instagrammers are turning off Like counts and grumbling about their lack of growth. Creators with five-figure followings are struggling to crack a thousand Likes on a photo. People blame Instagram’s pivot to video: The algorithm isn’t showing their posts, so naturally engagement is down, they argue, and in July, head of Instagram Adam Mosseri confirmed the platform’s increased focus on videos. But then, what to make of the plenty of cooks on my feeds who are doing just fine, resisting Reels and raking in tens of thousands of likes on pictures of bowls of pasta or oily bubbles of focaccia dough? With their follower counts ballooning, their work proves that photos can still perform — those photos just don’t look like what food on Instagram used to look like. Continued here

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The Visual Medium Has a Message - JSTOR Daily The artist’s role as the creator of a painting is usually obvious. Even the most casual viewer recognizes the artist’s signature or the choices that must be made when putting paint on canvas. In contrast, many assume that photographs have an unshakeable veracity, that they capture the world exactly as it is. Yet, just as anyone who recognizes themselves in a family photograph can attest, photographs obscure or leave out just as much reality as they contain. As Alan Trachtenberg notes, “They are, we learn, vulnerable to exactly the same obscurities of other forms of evidence.”Consider a photograph of a basketball player, mid-shot. Photography as a medium has the capability to freeze movement in time, to capture actions and interactions in a split second. Given this technical possibility, photography reflects a moment in a way that no other medium can. Yet this photograph is not a complete representation of basketball as a sport, this particular game, or even this specific moment on the court. Continued here

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How images from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope get their iconic look Pagan calls the work a “collaboration” between data, aesthetic principles built up over decades of scientific study, and subjective taste. That collaboration is necessary for many reasons, not least the huge distances between Webb and the objects being observed. In order to see this far, JWST uses the infrared spectrum. Because people can’t see infrared, researchers like Pagan have to make choices about how to translate that data into something visible. By understanding these choices, viewers can decode much more information than just the beautiful image itself. The colors, for instance, are something Pagan often gets questions about. JWST captures multiple exposures of narrowband data, meaning very small ranges of wavelengths within the infrared spectrum that correlate to the presence of specific elements — forms of hydrogen, sulfur, and oxygen. These are then colored according to a principle called chromatic ordering. Shorter wavelengths, like oxygen, are assigned to colors with shorter wavelengths, like blue, and so on. These are then overlaid to form the basis of the image. Continued here

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"You Don't Know Anything" And Other Writing Advice from Toni Morrison I can't think of another writer who is quite so universally beloved as Toni Morrison. Her work is magnificent, her legacy is unimpeachable, and she revealed her brilliance at every opportunity. She also taught for many years at Princeton, and I think it's safe to assume she knew a thing or two about nurturing young minds. I sifted through her interviews and speeches to find out what she thought about writing and highlighted some of her wisdom below.I wrote the first book because I wanted to read it. I thought that kind of book, with that subject—those most vulnerable, most undescribed, not taken seriously little black girls—had never existed seriously in literature. No one had ever written about them except as props. Since I couldn't find a book that did that, I thought, "Well, I'll write it and then I'll read it." It was really the reading impulse that got me into the writing thing. Continued here

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Who is the new Black Panther? | Every possible character in the suit | Radio Times We're yet to get confirmation of who is wearing the new suit – could Marvel have a surprise in store?The final trailer for Marvel blockbuster Black Panther: Wakanda Forever has stoked up fresh speculation over who will don the super-suit after the passing of King T'Challa (a plot point included after the tragic real-life death of actor Chadwick Boseman).In the clips and trailers released so far, Marvel Studios have avoided confirming the identity of the person under the mask, although based on their silhouette it appears to be one of the powerful women in Wakandan government.The most widely speculated names are T'Challa's sister and tech genius Shuri (Letitia Wright), T'Challa's lover and spy Nakia (Lupita Nyong'o), or head of the Dora Milaje and card-carrying Avenger, Okoye (Danai Gurira). Continued here

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The Good Fight: The show that sums up our times Six years ago, as the US went to the polls, a new TV show was busy filming its first season. The Good Fight was a spin-off from the long-running drama The Good Wife, which starred Julianna Margulies as anti-hero Alicia Florrick, a woman returning to a law career after her politician husband is embroiled in a sex scandal. This new show would focus on another character from The Good Wife, Florrick's boss and mentor, Diane Lockhart – played by Christine Baranski – a die-hard liberal and feminist who was about to witness her dream become reality as the US voted in their first female leader.Then, mid-way through filming the pilot, the election results landed. Suddenly, a show about a female lawyer in a world where the ultimate glass ceiling had been smashed and Hillary Clinton was president was totally redundant. The show's creators and showrunners Robert and Michelle King hastily reworked the opening scene to show an open-mouthed Diane Lockhart sitting in a dark room, watching Trump's inauguration on TV in disbelief and horror. Continued here

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A petition to make Bollywood shamelessly camp again Last night, I watched Malá Morská Víla (1976), the Czech version of The Little Mermaid. Not because I’m a cinephile (the only filmography I’m well versed with belongs to Govinda and Shah Rukh Khan), but because I saw a tweet about the gorgeous ~aesthetics~ of this movie (and partly because I’m unemployed.) The OP was absolutely right—the movie was fascinating. The actors playing mermaids did not have fishtails, nor were they clad in shell-shaped bikinis. The budget of the entire film was probably less than the money spent on Ariel’s hair colouring in the upcoming adaptation of The Little Mermaid. Most importantly, the source material was close to what Hans Christian Andersen envisioned, not the sanitised version Disney wants us to watch.The most striking thing about it was undoubtedly the fashion. The colours, the outfits, the hair—oh my god, the hair was spectacular. This movie probably invented that ‘seapunk aesthetic’ Tumblr was obsessed with a decade ago. After that, I watched Do Revenge (2022). Starring Maya Hawke and Camila Mendes, this movie was basically the answer to the question: “What if we take Strangers On A Train (1951) but give it the aesthetic of Gossip Girl (2007-2012) and the dialogues of Mean Girls (2004)?” I didn’t know I needed this movie so badly until I watched it. It was unhinged but glorious, and it really made me miss the “extra-ness” of the Bollywood movies I’ve grown up watching and loving. In the quest to be taken seriously, a lot of Hindi films seem to be losing the edge that made them stand out. Continued here

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Instagram is fueling a thrifting boom in India, Bangladesh, and Nepal Anusha Alamgir would spend at least a day every fortnight in the dingy back alley markets of Dhaka, browsing through piles of secondhand clothing and lugging massive bags of used tops, skirts, and dresses in rickshaws. Onlookers would often stare at her continuously, perhaps wondering what she did with hundreds of items of castoff clothing that are shipped here from countries like Italy and Japan.Alamgir sold these clothes through her Instagram thrift store, Colors Dhaka, which has more than 5,500 followers. (The thrift store is currently on pause as Alamgir is studying in the U.K.) Colors Dhaka was launched in October 2019 as a way for Alamgir to raise money for her book publishing business. What began as her selling items from her own wardrobe eventually turned into a profitable venture, earning between $200 and $2,100 each month, depending on how frequently she posted. Continued here

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15 Incredibly Unique Indian Cultural Experiences & Festivals Worth Knowing For every trip gone wrong and every tourist that’s been ripped off, there are hundreds of travellers whose lives have changed for the better after navigating their India. Ask any of the backpacking tourists you find in Goa, the avid trekkers in Himachal, the spiritual seekers in Dharamshala, or the retirees cruising the Kerala backwaters, and they’ll be likely to agree in unison about this. But the truth is, there’s so much beyond this holy trinity of rave-trek-spiritual destinations. Given all the fascinating ethnicities and religions we embrace,Varanasi local Nandan Upadhayay has been conducting walking tours of Varanasi for nine years. According to him, the only way to see the spiritual capital of India is on foot: the real Varanasi lives in its alleys. Temples and shrines, monasteries, ancient buildings, markets—everything can be found within the meandering alleyways behind the fabled ghats. He has three different kinds of walks, but the standout is the Learning and Burning Walk, which takes curious travellers from the ashrams of sadhus down to the cremation grounds and past sacred ponds and temples. If you’re interested in history, religion and spirituality, seriously consider this. After all, there’s no other city on the planet where people intentionally go to die — it is a well held belief that dying in Varanasi leads to moksha (liberation). Continued here

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A basic sense of numbers is shared by countless creatures | Psyche Ideas You might think of counting as something that people do involving the words one, two, three and so on. But we don’t require the use of these words to enumerate a collection of objects. Indeed, some languages do not have long lists of counting words. In studies of children who speak languages with a smaller set of such words (eg, words for one, two, few and many), such as the Indigenous Australian language Warlpiri, my colleagues and I found that they were at least as accurate as English-speaking children in assessing the number of objects in collections of up to 10. Jean Piaget, the influential Swiss developmentalist, argued that, as children, we arrive at what he called ‘the conception of number’ without recourse to counting words.Indeed, people see the world numerically: typically, one can’t help but notice the number of cups on the table, even if one is not consciously counting them. In fact, we and other researchers have demonstrated experimentally that the number of a small amount of objects can be registered in the brain without conscious awareness, as indicated by its effect on a subsequent, conscious counting task. Continued here

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Glimpse the lives behind the magic of Europe’s family circuses As the daughter of two flight attendants who took her on work trips to far-flung places—Singapore, Venezuela, Australia, India—photographer Stephanie Gengotti was used to a life on the go. So when she began following family circus troupes through Europe six years ago, the experience seemed familiar to her. “I feel very similar to these people because I also come from a family of travelers,” Gengotti says. “I connected to them. It reminded me of who I was.”When Gengotti embeds with a circus—whether it’s a mom-and-pop troupe with barely a web presence, or a Broadway-caliber operation with dozens of performers—she likes to take her time. Before Gengotti begins photographing, she observes and settles into the rhythms of life on the road. Then when she does pull out her camera, she focuses her lens more on the work, play, and family dynamics that occur offstage than on the action under the big top.  Continued here

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This Artist Spent Two Years Covering His Mansion in Doodles Cox, who also goes by the artist alias Mr. Doodle, has turned heads in the art world with his graphic doodle art, which is reminiscent of the work of 1980s graffiti-adjacent artist Keith Haring. Per Susannah Butter of the Sunday Times, the young artist acknowledges the similarities in their work, but says that his primary inspiration "still goes back to when I was kid watching 'Tom and Jerry,' 'Wacky Races' and 'SpongeBob SquarePants,' and video games like 'Crash Bandicoot.'"Different rooms and areas of the house were dictated by loose themes: The hallway, he tells the Sunday Times, evokes Noah's Ark, while the stairs represent heaven and hell. But beyond that, the doodles are improvised, and mistakes are left intact. Speaking with BBC Breakfast's Tim Muffett, Cox describes doodling as an "out-of-body" experience. "You're just indulging yourself in this free-flowing state of creation and it's just the best thing anyone can do, I think."  Continued here

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Why A Great Remote Leadership Strategy Is A Cure For Quiet Quitting Old-school leadership thinking looks like this: Half of business leaders believing remote employees aren’t working as hard; 48% of businesses using monitoring software to track remote employees; half of managers of knowledge workers planning to force people back into the office next spring. It’s all the leaders stuck in the traditionalist belief that remote workers are phoning it in. It’s the countless companies “flex washing” their job descriptions, promising remote work they don’t plan on allowing. The solution for quiet quitting isn’t to monitor employees or force them to work where they don’t want to work (the office), and it’s certainly not to hire more motivated people. Instead, organizations need a modern remote leadership strategy to train leaders to reframe their perspective of what makes for a hard worker and give them the essential tools for inspiring, engaging and motivating distributed teams. Continued here

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The worst Nobel Peace Prizes ever awarded The Nobel Peace Prize may be the most prestigious award on the planet. The winners are placed on pedestals, sanctified, and carry a certain gravitas for the rest of their lives. Unfortunately, as with the other prizes, the Nobel Peace Prize Committee occasionally makes a poor choice.Ronald Krebs of the University of Minnesota explained in an interview with Vice that the award increasingly has been given to candidates who are thought to exemplify certain ideals rather than in recognition of a particular achievement or a lifetime of achievements. This can lead to some buyer’s remorse years later. Likewise, sometimes awards are given to people with spotted records for one peacemaking event (or attempt) that does not entirely cover a spotted past. Here, we look at five of the worst choices for the Nobel Peace Prize, in no particular order.The 1994 prize went to Israeli Prime Minster Yitzhak Rabin, his foreign minister Shimon Peres, and the Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Yasser Arafat for signing the Oslo Accords — a pair of agreements between Israel and the PLO that were to be part of a larger planned peace process. Continued here

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India’s tech outsourcing giants are not happy about employees taking up second jobs. Here’s what the law says On September 16, Infosys sent an email to its employees, reminding them that they were not allowed to hold dual employment. On September 21, Wipro fired 300 employees over allegations of moonlighting. Meanwhile, India’s minister of state for electronics and information technology, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, came out in support of the practice, saying, “This is the age of employee-entrepreneurs and companies must now understand there has been a structural shift in the minds and attitudes of the young Indian tech workforce.” Tech Mahindra, a mid-sized IT firm, has said it might consider framing a policy that allows dual employment, as long as “someone is meeting the efficiency and productivity norms.”With respect to the IT industry, the Shops and Establishment Acts regulate the hours of work, terms of services, leave and holidays, payment of wages, and working conditions, among other things. The Act, in some states, says that an employee cannot work with another organization on a day on which they have been given a holiday. It is fair from a human rights standpoint that these are days given to the employee to rest and recuperate. Continued here

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Sick of data leaks, Indonesians are siding with a hacker who exposed 1.3 billion SIM card details Indonesians woke up to the breach in confusion, which quickly turned into anger. The Ministry of Communication and Information Technology, or Kominfo, responded by telling citizens they were responsible for regularly changing their passwords; popular meme accounts reposted the advice with bitter jokes. An official pleaded haplessly with Bjorka at a press conference: “If you can, please don’t attack.” “Stop being an idiot,” Bjorka jeered back on their Breach account. In a twist, many Indonesians have even sided with the hacker, who claimed to have executed the breach to expose sloppy data governance. Along with the mammoth citizen data leak, the gleefully chaotic Bjorka appeared to dox Kominfo Minister Johnny G. Plate on his own birthday. “Happy birthday,” they reportedly posted in their Telegram channel, Bjorkanism, followed by intimate details ranging from his address to home telephone number to vaccine ID. Continued here

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India cracked down on Chinese apps, but many still thrive under the radar Over the last two years, the short-form video app, Tiki, has helped fill the void left by the 2020 ban on TikTok and other Chinese-owned apps in India. During the first half of this year, the app ranked as roughly the 10th most popular social app in India by downloads, according to the app analytics firm, Apptopia. Since its launch in February 2021, as many as 96% of Tiki’s lifetime downloads have been from India.Tiki’s CEO and co-founder, Ian Goh, has frequently used the tagline “Make in India” to describe the app’s impact, citing the opportunities it’s opened up to rural Indian users. In one recent interview, Goh suggested the platform was meeting the needs of “real Indian content creators.” The app’s tagline mirrors the Narendra Modi government’s flagship “Make in India” initiative to boost manufacturing in the country. Continued here

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Deadly robberies force Bolt drivers to create self-defense groups in South Africa It was in the early hours of an evening in July when Tshepo Ntshangase rushed to his Hyundai Accent, parked outside his home in the Kwathema Township, an area east of Johannesburg. His neighborhood was known, especially in recent years, for late-night hijackings of ride-hailing app drivers, including the app he drove for, Bolt. Still, he had received a notification for a new ride request on his Bolt driver app and he took on the ride.But what had come in as a ride request turned out to be a setup. Less than 20 minutes after the gig call, Ntshangase was shot dead. His money, mobile phone, and vehicle were stolen. No one knows if he was able to press the SOS button on his Bolt driver app, designed as a panic button to alert the Bolt Safety team. The assailants were never located or arrested, according to his mother, Ntombi Ntshangase, who told Rest of World that she wished her son had not taken the gig at Bolt. “He wanted to give his three-year-old daughter a better life, no one could stop him. He would risk taking trips late at night, although he knew how dangerous it was,” she said.  Continued here

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WhatsApp is now a spammers’ paradise in India That day, the first 10 messages on her WhatsApp were all boilerplate outreach from corporations, promoting products, deals, and discount coupons. Rao told Rest of World that she first began noticing business outreach messages on WhatsApp at the end of 2021, but, in the past six months, it has become incessant. Verified handles, bearing green check marks, from businesses such as shopping app Flipkart, retail chain Croma, delivery app Zepto, fashion store Lifestyle, insurance provider BankBazaar, and others are flooding her personal WhatsApp chats.Meta’s WhatsApp is wildly popular in India, with around 550 million users in the country. Over the past year, the company has aggressively expanded its WhatsApp Business services in the country, allowing brands to reach out to customers, offer support, receive payments, and even verify documents. Direct access to customers over WhatsApp is an exciting proposition for Indian businesses since a reported 80% of messages sent on the app are seen within five minutes, making the platform an incredibly more efficient outreach channel than email or SMS. Continued here

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How Chinese citizens use puns to get past internet censors These Chinese social media users aren’t expressing a nascent interest in all things Dutch. They’re talking about recent protests over frozen bank deposits in the province of Henan. Ordinarily, discussions about a controversial topic like this would be censored on Chinese social media, and posts containing the word “Henan” could be blocked or deleted. But “Henan” (河南) sounds a lot like “Helan” (荷兰), the Mandarin word for the Netherlands. By swapping the names around, people were able to get past the censors and keep the conversation going.In China, people have perfected this kind of language play online as a way to discuss an ever-lengthening list of banned or controversial topics, creating an eternally shifting lexicon of online slang. “The play on puns and homophones has been a long existing literary and cultural tradition,” Shaohua Guo, author of The Evolution of the Chinese Internet, told Rest of World. “The prevalence of Internet use, particularly social media, further popularizes the practice.” Continued here

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This AI startup analyzes how shoppers move through a store to increase sales Retail analytics is not something new, but why hasn’t it gotten popular? One problem we pinpointed is that this type of products require[s] you to install new hardware, be it new sensors, new cameras or new servers. For most small and medium enterprises or retailers, having new installations brings tremendous trouble. One of the biggest features of Cyclops is we can plug and play with their existing surveillance cameras. We can feed their camera streams into our cloud for analysis. We also cover the consultation part, providing recommendations and insights. We can analyze what the cameras have captured; for example, how many people pass by your shop. Knowing that helps you understand how good the shop position is. We can also understand the number of people coming in, which would get us the conversion or walk-in rate. It shows whether or not your display has been effective in bringing people into the shop. We can do A/B testing on which display works better.  Continued here

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Ditching tech is the new tech fad Way back in June, something crystallized for me as we covered the Colombian elections: Tech alone is never enough. Candidate Rodolfo Hernández bet everything on an innovative system of social media campaigning; it got him past the first round, but he got crushed in the second. There are many factors behind his loss, but I am still astounded that the man would not go out and press the flesh — shake hands, kiss babies or whatever politicians do as they knock on doors. The same is true of companies that have prioritized tech over the human touch. In 2019, a panel of Latin American fintech gurus, there to extol the virtues of all-digital finance, sat alongside a top official from the Bank of Mexico. The fintech mantra of “cash is the competition” was already beginning to get clichéd, so the panel and audience were duly unsettled when the official argued that his priority was to facilitate the installation of ATMs in the more rural parts of the country. To be openly supporting the continuation and — shock — expansion of cash solutions was seen as a step away from the digitalized utopia that fintech fans had in mind.  Continued here

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Colombia banned the iPhone 14. Apple says it will sell it anyway In a small footnote in a recent press release, Apple announced it would release the iPhone 14 Plus in Colombia later this month. The problem was, the iPhone 14 has been banned in Colombia since its launch, due to Apple’s ongoing litigation with Swedish telecommunications company, Ericsson, around 5G networks. Carlos Olarte, Ericsson’s attorney in Colombia, was unaware of the announcement when Rest of World reached out. “I suspect it’s a mistake,” he said, underscoring that such a course of action would directly violate the ban.In July, a judge banned the importation and sale of any of Apple’s 5G devices after Ericsson filed a patent lawsuit against Apple in Colombia and many other countries. Ericsson wants Apple to pay for the use of its patented 5G technologies, though the network has yet to be deployed in the country. Its asking price is a $5 fee per iPhone, but Apple has refused to pay. So far, Colombia is the only country to have banned Apple’s 5G devices as a precautionary measure until a final verdict is reached. Continued here

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Engineering the Treatment of Early-Stage Lung Cancer [SPONSORED] This interview with Hannah McEwen, PhD, the head of engineering sciences for the Lung Cancer Initiative at Johnson & Johnson, will discuss novel procedures that offer minimally invasive solutions to aid in the identification, diagnosis and treatment of early-stage lung lesions. These include robotic bronchoscopes that help oncologists diagnose difficult to reach lung nodules, and treatments that may one-day be used to deliver therapy directly to early-stage tumors.Megan Hall: Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer deaths in the world. Why? Because it’s difficult to detect in its early stages and hard to treat once it’s discovered. The Lung Cancer Initiative at Johnson & Johnson is working to reverse that trend. And to do so, it needs not just doctors and researchers, but engineers. Hannah McEwen is the Head of Engineering Sciences for the group.  Continued here

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U.S. Secretary of the Interior: Satellites Will Help Us Fight Climate Change At the beginning of 2021, President Joe Biden exclaimed that “science is back” as we continued our efforts to address the COVID emergency. That phrase continues to ring true across the federal government. Science and its applications are being used at every agency—to address public health challenges, build new transportation infrastructure, inform policy decisions and tackle the climate crisis.Recently, the Interior Department’s U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) assumed operations of Landsat 9 from NASA, which built and launched it last year. This satellite helps to monitor Earth’s land, water and other natural resources. Landsat missions support environmental sustainability and climate resiliency through high-resolution satellite imaging. The Landsat program isn’t new; in July we celebrated 50 years of the NASA and USGS Landsat partnership that has helped us understand our planet and the changes that are occurring on it. That partnership has propelled research and observation forward over the years through the launch of successive Landsat satellites, each replacing its predecessors and working in tandem with new capabilities and strengths. Continued here

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This Indigenous Scientist Helped Save Lives as Covid Devastated the Navajo Nation “The Navajo Nation is the size of West Virginia, but yet there's only 13 grocery stores that lie within the reservation. Housing is overcrowded within and among Navajo households, and then you talk about preexisting health conditions, chronic diseases, also other infectious diseases. And in combination with the outbreak of COVID, it really hit our community extremely hard,” Lee said.  Continued here

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Ancient Panda ‘Thumb’ Matches Modern Version A bear that roamed what is now China about six million years ago is the oldest bamboo-eating panda ancestor yet found—and it had the same stubby pseudo thumbs that jut from the wrists of today's pandas alongside their five fingers. Fossils of the new species suggest such “thumbs,” which helped the animals grip and strip bamboo, maintained their peculiar shape to facilitate the beast's four-legged locomotion.The fossils, found in the province of Yunnan and described in Scientific Reports, also push back the date that pandas' ancestors likely transitioned from eating meat to chomping bamboo—from two million to six million years ago. “Giving up on a carnivorous diet means trading the volatile life of a carnivore for quiet consumption of the plentiful bamboo,” says paleontologist and study lead author Xiaoming Wang of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles, adding that it was “not a bad deal.” Continued here

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How the Pandemic Shortened Life Expectancy, and New Drugs on the Horizon: COVID, Quickly, Episode 40 The data come from the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, which recently published provisional data for 2021. Elizabeth Arias and her NCHS colleagues calculated something called a life table. It basically takes a hypothetical group of infants born in 2021, and applied the real-world death rates of every age group to those infants across their whole lives. The result is an estimate of the total population’s life expectancy. Fischman: And that’s precisely the problem. These mabs were configured to fit that early virus, like a key fitting into a lock. But now there are 5 or so newer variants making the rounds—BA.5 is still the dominant one—and those have mutations that essentially change the shape of the lock. So most of the mabs don’t fit anymore. One, called bebtelovimab, still does a pretty good job, but most of the others that have been authorized by the FDA do not. Continued here

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A Supersmeller Can Detect the Scent of Parkinson’s, Leading to an Experimental Test for the Illness A Scottish woman named Joy Milne made headlines in 2015 for an unusual talent: her ability to sniff out people afflicted with Parkinson’s disease, a progressive neurodegenerative illness that is estimated to affect nearly a million people in the U.S. alone. Since then a group of scientists in the U.K. has been working with Milne to pinpoint the molecules that give Parkinson’s its distinct olfactory signature. The team has now zeroed in on a set of molecules specific to the disease—and has created a simple skin-swab-based test to detect them.Milne, a 72-year-old retired nurse from Perth, Scotland, has hereditary hyperosmia, a condition that endows people with a hypersensitivity to smell. She discovered that she could sense Parkinson’s with her nose after noticing her late husband, Les, was emitting a musky odor that she had not detected before. Eventually, she linked this change in scent to Parkinson’s when he was diagnosed with the disease many years later. Les passed away in 2015. Continued here

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‘Bit of Panic’: Astronomers Forced to Rethink Early JWST Findings Astronomers have been so keen to use the new James Webb Space Telescope that some have got a little ahead of themselves. Many started analysing Webb data right after the first batch was released, on 14 July, and quickly posted their results on preprint servers—but are now having to revise them. The telescope’s detectors had not been calibrated thoroughly when the first data were made available, and that fact slipped past some astronomers in their excitement.Figuring out how to redo the work is “thorny and annoying”, says Marco Castellano, an astronomer at the Italian National Institute of Astrophysics in Rome. “There’s been a lot of frustration,” says Garth Illingworth, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “I don’t think anybody really expected this to be as big of an issue as it’s becoming,” adds Guido Roberts-Borsani, an astronomer at the University of California, Los Angeles. Continued here

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These Technologies Help You Live Lightly on a Fragile Planet Carbon emissions are driving the biosphere toward a three-degree-Celsius rise in average temperature, as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recently noted in its Sixth Assessment Report. Intense and frequent droughts, flooding, wildfires and food insecurity are already devastating parts of the world. The usual “clean technology” solution to reduce carbon emissions has serious ecological and social costs, however.Renewable energy threatens to generate mountains of waste and destruction. Just replacing fossil-fuel-powered cars with fleets of electric vehicles, for example, requires vast amounts of new materials. These include critical minerals and rare-earth elements, all of which involve controversial extractive practices that damage ecosystems and people. In short, the clean-tech pathway threatens to exaggerate the exploitation of our precious living planet and fails to account for the uneven burdens felt by the poor and vulnerable, who cannot afford price hikes or the purchase of new “eco-friendly” appliances and devices. Similarly, burgeoning markets for carbon offsets (also called carbon credits) allow the wealthy to pollute at the expense of the poor, as demonstrated by the record of the United Nation’s carbon-offset program for forests. Continued here