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The heat from Starlink’s receiver dishes is helping felines and other small animals stay warm through the cold winters.

Starlink is an important project of SpaceX and Elon Musk to provide high-speed satellite Internet to mankind. Although it is not yet clear how we humans will benefit, this project is definitely being extremely popular with cats, at least for the time being. The reason is because Starlink’s receiver dishes are becoming the ideal place for cats to rest and warm up in the cold winter.

Specifically, on a Twitter post on New Year’s Eve, one user named Aaron Taylor captured an image of 5 cats cuddled up on one of Starlink satellite dishes. Meanwhile, though the outdoor temperature seemed quite low and the ground was still covered with snow, the heat emitted from the receiver dishes appeared to be enough to warm the kittens, making them continue to lie there.

The elixir of technological innovation and the information it delivers at our very fingertips every day has proven to be a Pandora’s Box unleashing misinformation, rumour, hate, selfish malfeasance, and violence. Since when did access to knowledge produce so much havoc? Because that’s what appears to be happening with COVID-19, climate change, and more.


My more recent personal experience is equally relevant. When I got COVID-19 in April 2020, it attacked the lining of my heart temporarily enlarging the upper left chamber where pulmonary veins interact with the muscle. Those veins were damaged by the virus leading to the beginning of changes to my heart rhythm and the onset of atrial fibrillation and other arrhythmias.

Three weeks before getting infected I had a full physical in preparation for upcoming knee replacement surgery. At the time I was told that my heart was healthy with no underlying medical conditions of concern. Then COVID-19 struck leading me to go to the hospital emergency where I was told that I was in danger of an imminent stroke and was now a heart patient.

There was no vaccine at the time to protect me, but today there is now, and more than one good option. So I would say to this young man, the certainty of the virus further damaging your heart is much greater than the likelihood of vaccination doing more damage to it than already is there. And I would say to his mom, please help your son find the real experts and not Internet-based influencers so that you together can separate the disinformation chaff from the knowledge wheat, and by doing so give him the best chance to survive.

There’s a land rush happening — and it’s not in New York City or Beverly Hills.

Early speculators, professional real estate agents, and celebrities are buying up land that doesn’t even exist in the real world. They are investing in metaverse real estate, a concept mind-boggling to most people.

So, what exactly is the metaverse? Technologists say the metaverse is the next level of the internet. It’s a virtual reality platform where people can play games, connect with friends, attend meetings, and even go to virtual concerts. Ever since Facebook announced it would change its name to Meta and focus on building its own digital world, interest in metaverse real estate skyrocketed.

A team of researchers from the University of Surrey’s Advanced Technology Institute (ATI) and the Federal University of Pelotas (UFPel), Brazil, has developed a new type of supercapacitor that can be integrated into footwear or clothing, an advance with applications in wearables and IoT (Internet of Things) devices.

A supercapacitor is an electricity storage device, similar to a battery, but it stores and releases electricity much faster.

The researchers have devised a novel method for the development of flexible supercapacitors based on carbon nanomaterials. The new method, which is cheaper and less time-consuming to fabricate, involves transferring aligned carbon nanotube (CNT) arrays from a silicon wafer to a polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) matrix. This is then coated in a material called polyaniline (PANI), which stores energy through a mechanism known as pseudocapacitance, offering outstanding energy storage properties with exceptional mechanical integrity.