The Apollo astronauts didn’t stay long, but could a newly discovered cave on the Moon provide long-term shelter for humans? CC-licensed photo by NASA on The Commons on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Any bears? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
Why melting ice sheets are making our days longer • The Washington Post
Kasha Patel:
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As temperatures rise globally, Earth’s polar regions have felt the brunt of the heat added since the 20th century. The melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets account for nearly one-third of global sea level rise since the early 1990s. But the melting is not affecting just sea levels.
As the polar ice melts, the water moves from the poles toward the equator — making our Earth rotate slower as it gets bulkier. Think of a figure skater who spins slower when her arms are stretched out compared to tucked into her body. The same applies to Earth’s rotation, said Benedikt Soja, a co-author and professor at ETH Zürich.
Soja and the team showed in findings published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal on Monday that recent, rapid melting of Greenland and Antarctic ice has increased the length of our days. Using past observations and projection models, they found the ice loss added time to Earth’s day between 0.3 to 1 milliseconds%ury through the 20th century. But since 2000, the rate has accelerated to 1.33 milliseconds%ury.
For billions of years, the speed of our planet’s rotation has dominantly been influenced by our moon. The moon yanks on the planet’s oceans and causes the tides to bulge, creating drag and slowing down Earth’s spin. Earth’s rotation has been predictably and consistently slowing down because of the moon’s gravitational forces — around 2.40 milliseconds%ury, according to the study’s authors.
But the study “shows what we as humans can really impact in terms of changing Earth’s behavior and dynamics.”
Some scientists were not surprised by the study’s link to climate change. Richard Peltier, a physicist at the University of Toronto, published a study more than a decade ago stating “the changes in Earth rotation documented were caused by the global warming process.” Another recent study showed how this climate induced-day lengthening is affecting our timekeeping and delaying the leap second.
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The first AI-powered storytelling teddy bear is here. I gave it to my kids to test • CNET
Bridget Carey:
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Poe, a stuffed plush that’s powered by four AA batteries, needs an app to generate new stories. The audio files created are sent to the bear via a Bluetooth connection, and his mouth moves to “talk” when playing the audio. But Poe doesn’t always need the app to play a story. You can save your favorite stories on the bear and play it back at any time by pressing its ears.
The app has a simple design. It walks a child through a series of pictures, representing characters, objects and setting, to choose the ingredients of their story. The options go beyond what’s found in a typical fairy tale. Take, for example, the choice of characters: You can blend a story with a witch, social media influencer, alien warlord, zombie and archeologist. The more that’s added to the story stew, the stranger it gets.
…To me, the stories it generates exist in a literary uncanny valley, with stories taking random turns to fit all the parameters of the prompt. It was sometimes difficult to follow every line of a story when the vocabulary felt out of place for a children’s story, like the ChatGPT AI was overusing a thesaurus.
Take this moment from a scary time-travel story we made about a princess, a prince, and a thief:
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The once vibrant kingdom had fallen under a dark curse by the evil Prince Barron. His sorcery summoned shadowy wraiths to haunt the land, chilling the hearts of Allara’s people.
A ghastly apparition materialized beside her, the vengeful spirit of Queen Avelina, Allara’s ancestor from centuries past. “The phantom hour draws near,” Avelina’s raspy voice warned. “The stars aligned to undo this ancient wrong.”
Before Allara could respond, the sinister cackle of the thief Kiros echoed through the chamber. With a poof of smoke, he appeared clutching Avelina’s chronosphere, a mystical orb used for chronological travel.
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Google now defaults to not indexing your content • Vincent Schmalbach
Schmalbach is an “SEO expert”:
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put yourself in Google’s shoes. You’re facing a future where AI can generate infinite amounts of human-like content. What do you do?
Google’s response was twofold:
• Promote the vague concept of E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness). In practice, this translates to favoring well-known brands and established websites
• Abandon the mission of indexing everything. Instead, become selective. Very selective.This brings us to the current state of affairs: Google is no longer trying to index the entire web. In fact, it’s become extremely selective, refusing to index most content. This isn’t about content creators failing to meet some arbitrary standard of quality. Rather, it’s a fundamental change in how Google approaches its role as a search engine.
From my experience, Google now seems to operate on a “default to not index” basis. It only includes content in its index when it perceives a genuine need. This decision appears to be based on various factors:
• Extreme content uniqueness: It’s not enough to write about something that isn’t extensively covered. Google seems to require content to be genuinely novel or fill a significant gap in its index
• Perceived authority: Sites that Google considers highly authoritative in their niche may have more content indexed, but even then, it’s not guaranteed
• Brand recognition: Well-known brands often see most of their content indexed, while small or unknown bloggers face much stricter selectivity
• Temporary indexing and de-indexing: In practice, Google often indexes new content quite quickly, likely to avoid missing out on breaking news or important updates. Soon after, Google may de-index the content, and it remains de-indexed thereafter. So getting initially indexed isn’t necessarily a sign that Google considers your content valuable.I’ve observed this shift firsthand. In the past, when I set up a new domain, it would be indexed within an hour or faster, sometimes in seconds. This was true even for brand new domains with no mentions anywhere and no backlinks. When I searched for the title of one of those brand new blog posts or some unique sentence from the article, it would be right there on the first Google page.
Now, for each piece of content, Google decides if it’s worth indexing, and more often than not, the answer seems to be “no.”
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This is quite a shift. Google used to be very proud of the speed of its indexing and updates. But how does it decide “genuinely novel”?
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The watchOS 11 beta slowed me down, in a good way • The Verge
Victoria Song:
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One thing always irked me about the Apple Watch. Rain or shine, in sickness and in health, it pushed me to close my rings. Never mind if I had Covid-19, shin splints, or was mentally in a dark place. It nudged me to be a “better” version of myself, so long as better didn’t involve a day off. But with watchOS 11 — the public beta of which arrived on Monday — it feels like my Apple Watch is finally cutting me some slack.
This is largely due to a trio of new features: the new Vitals app, Training Load feature, and the ability to pause your Activity Rings. I waxed lyrical about the latter right after WWDC, but after spending some time with the developer beta, I’m convinced these are the smartest fitness updates Apple’s rolled out in years.
The Vitals app and Training Load feature are technically two separate things, but in practice, they very much go hand in hand. The Vitals app contextualizes a set of metrics: heart rate, respiratory rate, wrist temperature, blood oxygen, and sleep duration. These are all recovery metrics, most commonly packaged in other apps as a readiness score, except Apple’s version doesn’t give you a single score. Rather, it shows you whether your metrics are “typical” or an “outlier.” If two or more metrics are out of range, you’ll get a notification and some possibilities as to why certain metrics are out of whack.
The Training Load feature is also straightforward. It compares and visualizes your seven-day versus 28-day exercise load. Based on that, you can see whether you’re well below, below, steady, above, or well above your usual activity levels. It breaks this down not only by overall activity but also by individual activity types (i.e., running, pilates, cycling, etc.). After a workout, you can also rate your perceived effort level. For popular workouts, like running, it’ll automatically set your effort level. (You can manually edit it if you disagree, which I occasionally did, though it’s broadly accurate.)
…Apple isn’t doing anything here that we haven’t seen from Garmin, Polar, Oura, Fitbit, Whoop, or any other health and fitness tracker in the past five years. Rather, Apple’s version makes these concepts easily digestible for beginners. It’s also less data overload for burnt-out athletes. Combined with the ability to pause rings or customize your goals based on the day of the week, you’ve got a much more flexible fitness tracking experience on the world’s most popular smartwatch. That’s a huge deal.
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This is a big point: Apple might not be (often isn’t) first with a feature, but it brings it more simply to more people. Personally, I tend to know whether I’ve done a lot or a little exercise in the past month.
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How conspiracy theories swirled after Donald Trump shooting • BBC News
Marianna Spring:
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What unfolded on X was straight out of the pages of the conspiracy theory playbook, honed on social media by committed activists who deny the reality of almost everything, including the Covid pandemic, wars, mass shootings and terror attacks.
One post from a US-based account with a track record of sharing unfounded claims like this wrote: “This is price you pay when you take down the elite satanic paedophiles.”
They were alluding to the QAnon conspiracy theory, which suggests Trump is waging a secret war against a deep state – a shadowy coalition of security and intelligence services, hidden from plain sight, looking to thwart his every move.
Without any evidence to support the idea, they then went on to suggest the “order” for the assassination “likely came from the CIA” and accused Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Mike Pence of being involved. There is no evidence to support any of that – but the post has been seen 4.7 million times.
It’s a familiar pattern, but the real change here is how this kind of lingo is being widely used by the average social media users. That’s not only people who don’t like Trump suggesting this was staged, but also ones who support him alleging this is part of a sprawling conspiracy theory.
Elected politicians have also got involved. Congressman Mike Collins, a Republican in Georgia, posted that “Joe Biden sent the orders”. He referenced a comment President Biden had made earlier in the week about putting “Trump in a bullseye”, referring to their election battle.
There are legitimate questions being asked about some of the language used to describe Trump by other politicians and the media, as well as online, which some of Trump’s supporters argue has inflamed tensions and contributed to this assassination attempt. But to suggest this was ordered by President Biden is an entirely different proposition all together.
Collins’ post has more than six million views on X – but has since been labelled with a Community Note, which says there is no evidence Mr Biden was involved in any way. It added that his “bullseye” remark has been taken out of context.
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Ironic how it was just last week that the EU was complaining about Musk’s decision to make “verified” users just paid-for, rather than putatively authoritative.
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Elon Musk is making a bad situation worse • The Atlantic
Helen Lewis:
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For a long time, scientists have hypothesized that exposure to lead causes a measurable drop in IQ. I am beginning to think the same is true of X.
The platform’s owner, Elon Musk, is undoubtedly a clever man, but in search of attention and notoriety online, he has become—or is pretending to be—very dumb indeed. How else to explain his half-baked media criticisms after the attempted assassination of Donald Trump?
In the minutes after the shooting in Pennsylvania, news outlets did what they should do: They scrambled to sort fact from speculation. Reporters quickly uncovered the shooter’s identity and complicated political affiliations, informing the discussion of his possible motives. Photo agencies distributed high-quality and widely praised images of the incident, something they could do because they routinely send experienced photographers to cover rallies across the political spectrum. The British Broadcasting Corporation secured a crucial interview with a witness who claimed to have seen the shooter climbing a roof with a rifle—a statement that will force the Secret Service to answer tough questions about its competence.
None of that mattered to Elon Musk. Instead, he drew attention to the very first headlines from The Washington Post, ABC, and USA Today. These were cautious, reporting only that Trump was removed from the stage by the Secret Service following “popping noises” or “loud noises.” (For a time, CNN misleadingly asserted that Trump “falls at rally.”) In most cases, they were updated within minutes, first to “apparent gunshots” and then “gunshots,” as more information became available. All of the above outlets have since given blanket coverage to the shooting.
As I write this, CNN has 10 articles about the shooting on its homepage, and the lead headline describes what happened as an “assassination attempt.” Yet Musk’s posts encouraged the suggestion that the media were downplaying the shooting to deny Trump his moment of heroic bravery. A user called DogeDesigner had compiled all the early headlines into a collage, which Musk reposted, adding approvingly: “The legacy media is a pure propaganda machine. X is the voice of the people.”
Why were the early headlines like that? The term fog of war exists for a reason.
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The phrase “more money than sense” does too, and Lewis doesn’t hold back in this excoriating piece.
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Moon cave discovery could redirect lunar colony and startup plays • TechCrunch
Devin Coldewey:
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Scientists have identified what they believe is an accessible tunnel or cave on the moon. Such a feature, if real, may well define years of development by startups, governments and space companies aiming to create a lasting lunar colony.
Italian astronomers led by Leonardo Carrer and Lorenzo Bruzzone, working with Capella Space and JHUAPL, analyzed data collected by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter in 2010. Specifically, its radar imagery of the surface, which in one place the team proposes was reflected in such a way that implies the presence of “a subsurface cave tens of meters long” — but potentially much larger.
It’s still at the bottom of a pit around 100 meters deep, but we’ll figure that part out later. What matters here is that we appear to have discovered a highly stable (otherwise it would have collapsed some time in the last few million years) moon cave that could serve as a base for lunar operations. Their findings are published in Nature Astronomy.
You may well ask: why hide in some ancient lava tunnel? Don’t we want to just make a surface habitat?
That’s certainly what we envision from science fiction, yes, but the reality is that the moon’s surface is quite an inhospitable place. With no ionosphere, it has no protection from solar or cosmic radiation, and its pocked surface shows how frequently it is bombarded by meteorites large and small, which are not slowed or burned up in an atmosphere. The temperature also varies from deep-space low to dangerously hot.
These and other factors mean that any surface dwelling would need to be extremely robust, and even so it would face serious risk over time. For this reason lunar cave systems have often been proposed as alternatives to building the whole thing ourselves.
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Great! Although the impossibility of living for long periods on the Moon due to the nanoscale dust is still not solved by having found a cave.
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Promised cures, tainted cells: how cord blood banks mislead parents • The New York Times
Sarah Kliff and Azeen Ghorayshi:
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Millions of pregnant women get the pitch through their OB-GYN [obstetrician/gynaecologist – honestly, Americans, can’t you use real words?]: Put a bit of your newborn’s umbilical cord on ice, as a biological insurance policy. If your child one day faces cancer, diabetes or even autism, the precious stem cells in the cord blood could become a tailor-made cure.
Many families are happy to pay for the assurance of a healthy future. More than two million umbilical cord samples sit in a handful of suburban warehouses across the country. It’s a lucrative business, with companies charging several thousand dollars upfront plus hundreds more every year thereafter. The industry has grown rapidly, bolstered by investments from medical device companies, hospital partnerships and endorsements from celebrities like Drew Barrymore and Chrissy Teigen.
But the leading banks have consistently misled customers and doctors about the technology’s promise, an investigation by The New York Times found. Doctors rarely use cord blood anymore, thanks to advances that have made it easier to transplant adult stem cells. And the few parents who try to withdraw cord blood samples often find that they are unusable — either because their volume is too low or they have been contaminated with microbes.
… Just 19 stem-cell transplants using a child’s own cord blood have been reported since 2010, according to the Center for International Blood and Marrow Transplant Research. Newer research has led many doctors to abandon cord blood in favor of adult stem cells.
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Quickly becomes clear that it’s an industry peddling a cure that doesn’t work which has to keep going because the alternative is, to that industry, unthinkable.
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Four Colorado poultry workers diagnosed with bird flu • Associated Press via The Guardian
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Four poultry workers in Colorado have been diagnosed with bird flu, health officials have confirmed.
The new cases bring the US total to nine since the first human case of the current outbreak was detected in 2022, also in a Colorado poultry worker. Eight of the nine were reported this year.
Their illnesses were relatively mild – reddened and irritated eyes and common respiratory infection symptoms such as fever, chills, coughing, sore throat and runny nose. None were hospitalized, officials said.
The other US cases have also been mild.
A fifth person with symptoms is undergoing testing, but those results are not back yet, officials said. The workers were culling poultry at a farm in north-east Colorado, according to state health officials. All had direct contact with infected birds.
A bird flu virus has been spreading since 2020 among mammals – including dogs, cats, skunks, bears and even seals and porpoises – in scores of countries. Earlier this year the virus, known as H5N1, was detected in US livestock, and is now circulating in cattle in several states.
Health officials continue to characterize the threat to the general public as low, and the virus has not spread between people. But officials are keeping careful watch because earlier versions of the same virus have been deadly to people.
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Besides the watching brief, note that CBS News has a story from a day earlier which says there are five poultry workers infected. (Thanks Joe S for the latter.)
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
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