Never mind Vogon poetry. If you want to read some really awful lines, I can dig out the insipid, self-absorbed free verse that I wrote in college. But using it like this, as cartoonist Madeline Horwarth suggests, would probably be a crime.
It might sound unlikely, but data does have a potential to end the human race. To be specific, it’s not data itself, but data storage.
As societies increasingly rely on digital information and there's more and more of it, we'll one day reach a point where the number of bits being stored will outnumber the atoms that make up our planet. That's according to theoretical physicist and Senior Lecturer Melvin Vopson at the University of Portsmouth in the UK. A peer‐reviewed paper on his theory, called "The Information Catastrophe," was recently published in the journal AIP Advances.
According to the Jefferson Lab, there are about 1.33 x 10^50 atoms in our planet. That’s a lot.
"Currently, we produce ∼1021 digital bits of information annually on Earth," Vopson begins. This is based on an IBM estimate that humans produce 2.5 quintillion digital data bytes daily. With an assumed 20 percent growth rate, the number of bits we produce will outnumber the entirety of atoms on the planet in around 350 years. In a press release, Vopson said, "We are literally changing the planet bit by bit, and it is an invisible crisis."
There are a lot of variables to consider. For instance, the number of bits produced each year, data storage capacity, energy production and the size of the bit compared to the atom (mass distribution). There are human‐centered factors too, such as population growth and the rate of access to information technology in developing countries. "If we assume a more realistic growth rates of 5%, 20%, and 50%," the paper states, "the total number of bits created will equal the total number of atoms on Earth after ∼1,200 years, ∼340 years, and ∼150 years, respectively."
That’s scarier than the sun exploding. And to make matters worse, we also have to deal with climate change.
More details about this over at Big Think.
What are your thoughts about this one?
(Image Credit: TheDigitalArtist/ Pixabay)
I recently told my husband I thought diceiversaries should be a thing; those anniversaries or birthdays that coincide with a key die. So, for our wedding anniversary today, he mounted a golden D12 on a pedestal.
— Emma Vieceli 🦋 (@Emmavieceli) August 30, 2020
It's our D12 day! ♥️💘💑🥂🎲 pic.twitter.com/7fiPL1mFgO
When a couple reaches their d4, d6, d8, d12, d20 anniversary, it's time to celebrate it! Live long enough and you may need to mount percentile dice or one of those cumbersome 100-sided dice. Emma Vieceli's husband has the right idea.
-via Super Punch
In this photo, Ashley’s 2-year-old daughter can be seen falling into the pavement after letting go of her mother's hand when she leaned away from her. But this wasn’t the only time she fell on this day, as the same happened to her again later that day.
Images via Awkward Family Photos
An adorable squirrel, most likely in Russia, happily eats pine nuts out of a guy's hand until suddenly he realizes that he's eating out of a guy's hand! Remembering what his mother always told him about humans, he freezes in place and appears almost catatonic. The guy keeps trying to feed him, until the squirrel comes to his senses. -via Geekologie
Cows are known to have four stomachs. With that in mind, we expect them to chew food really well. But it turns out, when they eat corn, cows also poop corn kernels — the same experience that we humans have.
This is somewhat surprising, since cows are ruminant animals whose digestive systems can break down tough materials better than ours can. When cows swallow their food, it softens in a special digestive chamber called a rumen and then gets sent back up for another round of mastication. (This also explains why it seems like cows are always munching on something.) But scientists have discovered that corn sometimes manages to emerge partially unscathed from this process of “chewing the cud.”
Not entirely unscathed, though. As University of Nebraska-Lincoln ruminant nutritionist Andrea Watson told Live Science, it’s only the thin yellow exterior of each kernel that escapes digestion. This is made of cellulose, a durable fiber that helps shield corn from bad weather, pests, and other potential damage. Humans can’t break down cellulose, but cows usually do a pretty good job—a testament to corn’s resilience.
What are your thoughts about this one?
(Image Credit: ulleo/ Pixabay)
The ad above appeared in 1910 seeking cats for a scene in Oscar Hammerstein's comedic opera Hans the Flute Player. (Hammerstein was the grandfather of the lyricist you are familiar with.) The scene was one in which the titular flute player would lure all the town's cats away, which required a herd of cats. The ad went on to say that no acting experience was required, and that cats should be brought to the stage door of the Manhattan Opera House the next morning. What could possibly go wrong? A followup article on the eve of the opera's premiere gave more details.
According to this article, the plan was not to have the cats come snooping from behind doors, but to have them suspended from wires above the stage. As explained by stage director Jacques Coini, when the piper marched toward the painted river, the cats would be lowered with a rush. The reporter noted, “They were counted upon to become frightened and utter the usual unearthly yowls.”
The morning after the help-wanted ad for cats appeared, a young man drove up to the stage door of the Manhattan Opera House with a wagon filled with a few hundred cats. He began selling the cats for $7 each to people who thought they would get a higher price from Hammerstein.
Read what happened to Hammerstein's grand plan at The Hatching Cat. -via Strange Company
In Thailand, the duck industry and the rice industry are symbiotic. The ducks rid the rice paddies of snails and insects after the harvest. They also fertilize the fields, one would assume. The ducks get fed. And we get to watch an army of 10,000 ducks waddling to work. It's a win-win all around! -via Boing Boing
When tech company Intel launched their 11th gen core processor, they claimed that it was the “best processor in the market.” One of the many things that Intel boasts about their processor is their new Xe integrated graphics. It is known that the previous integrated graphics of the said company is good for general purpose, but not for gaming. But is it different this time?
Monica Chin from The Verge was able to get her hands on a Tiger Lake reference design that Intel sent to her. Here’s what she found out.
Good news for Intel: Xe graphics are the real deal. Overwatch was playable at 1080p on Ultra (averaging 89fps) and Epic (averaging 59fps). Let that sink in — a system with integrated graphics is running Overwatch, on its highest possible settings, at almost 60fps. That system beat the 4800U, which only managed 46fps on Ultra, and the 1065G7, which didn’t even pass 65fps on low settings in Engadget’s testing. Incidentally, this is also bad news for Nvidia — with integrated graphics like this available, there’s no reason anyone needs to pay for an entry-level GPU like the MX350.
She also pits Intel’s processor against AMD’s to see which outperforms which.
More details about this over at the site.
(Image Credit: Monica Chin/ The Verge)
Every year, the Great Smoky Mountains National Park posts their interactive fall foliage map, so that you can plan a road trip to catch the most breathtaking views of trees turning into their blazing natural colors after they lose their chlorophyll.
However, you might not want to take to the road this year. But like college classes, awards shows, and annual festivals, you can do it online! Many parks and local governments are setting up webcams that will allow you to check the fall colors as they change in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Georgia, Vermont, New Hampshire, Colorado, and other places. Find a list of these webcams at Mental Floss.
Whether it’s a video call conference with our friends or co-workers, we always want to look good in front of the webcam. We figure out the right angle, and we remove the things that we don’t want to be seen in the camera. In other words, we don’t show what’s really going on in our homes. But scientist Gretchen Goldman was brave enough to post her real setup.
The caption stated: “Just so I'm being honest,” and the tweet amassed 282.5k likes and 30.6k retweets.
Many people followed Goldman’s example, and they, too, showed the things that cannot be seen by the people on the other side of the screen.
Check out the pictures over at Bored Panda.
(Image Credit: Gretchen Goldman, PhD/ Twitter)
The magazine Annals of Improbable Research has bestowed the annual Ig Nobel Prizes for scientific research "that makes you laugh, then makes you think." The award ceremony was held virtually this year, which you can see here.
The 2020 Ig Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the governments of India and Pakistan, after their diplomats played ding-dong-ditch with each other. A special Management Prize was awarded to five professional hit men in China for each taking a cut of the profits and never committing the murder. A Medical Education Prize was awarded to a group of world leaders for teaching us that "politicians can have a more immediate effect on life and death than scientists and doctors can." And there were some actual scientists who won Ig Nobel Prizes. Find out who they are in the complete winners list ahead.
Scoop: @NASA astronauts will soon film their first commercial in space - an ad for an @EsteeLauder beauty product on the ISS.https://t.co/07VhzGYmpe pic.twitter.com/UZKaSfCkLC
— Mark Harris (@meharris) September 16, 2020
Ever since its launch in 1998, the International Space Station, or the ISS, has served as a microgravity and space environment research laboratory for scientific research in various fields such as astrobiology, astronomy, physics, and others. But it seems that the ISS will not only be just a laboratory soon. It might also become a shooting location in the near future.
Estée Lauder, a multinational cosmetics company, has secured an out-of-this-world shooting location—the International Space Station.
A face cream called “Advanced Night Repair" will be part of the “first purely commercial activity in NASA's new regime,” according to reporter Mark Harris, who broke the news in New Scientist.
Up to 10 bottles of the beauty product will be bundled into a cargo resupply run to the station this fall, so that NASA crew members can shoot videos and images with them in the microgravity environment.
What are your thoughts about this one?
(Image Credit: Mark Harris/ Twitter/ Vice.com)
Paleontologists discovered the world’s oldest animal sperm in Myanmar. The sperm was found frozen inside a tiny crustacean in a blob of tree resin dated 100 million years old! It was found in the body of a female specimen, indicating that she must have been fertilized shortly before being trapped in amber, as Rappler details:
To make the find even more special, the sperms were also described as "giants," measuring up to 4.6 times the size of the body of the male.
"This is equivalent to about 7.30 meters in a 1.70-meters human, so it requires a lot of energy to produce them," Renate Matzke-Karasz of the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, co-author of the study, told AFP.
The ostracod was also a new species that the scientists have named "Myanmarcypris hui."
Image via wikimedia commons
Madurai City is bustling with life all hours of the day. From markets that are considered as a hub of old legends and trades to temples that depict colorful stories of the land through its art and architecture, the city is a great place to visit (once this pandemic is over, of course). The city’s Meenakshi temple is the finest example of Dravidian architecture. The 2000-year-old temple holds a legendary golden tank that supposedly drowned unworthy manuscripts. Check out more reasons to visit Madurai City via the Lonely Planet’s piece here.
Image via the Lonely Planet
