A surprise discovery announced a month ago suggested that the early universe looked very different than previously believed. Initial theories that the discrepancy was due to dark matter have come under fire.
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If you rely on WhatsApp to message friends and family, it’s important to know that the service lets your contacts know about when you’re available to chat, and whether you’ve read their texts.
That’s not all: Lifehacker has spotted Chatwatch, a new iOS app that uses WhatsApp’s public online/offline status feature to tell users how often their friends check the app, and estimate when they go to bed each day; it can even correlate data on two contacts you choose to guess if they’ve been talking to each other.
Yeah, there’s no need to give anyone that sort of ammo. I prefer to maintain a low profile on messaging services so I can chat and respond on my own terms, so it’s rather alarming to know that my contacts can keep tabs on me this way.
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It’s not a great feeling to know that you scared your doctors. Unfortunately for a man in the UK, he recently did so: he displayed a case of gonorrhea that so dramatically resisted treatment that it chilled his physicians.
That’s partially because gonorrhea isn’t the best thing to leave untreated. But another reason: this case is a harbinger of a looming crisis.
Gonorrhea is an infection caused by a bacteria. Usually antibiotics can kill it.
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I was on a panel at a recent conference when the moderator asked audience and panel members what they thought of UBI. The overwhelming consensus of the 500 or so people in the room appeared to be “we’re skeptical, but should experiment.” UBI sounds like a good or not-so-good idea to different constituents because we have so little understanding of either how we would do it, or how people would react. None of us really knows what we’re talking about when it comes to UBI, akin to being in a drunken bar argument before there were smartphones and Wikipedia. But there are a few basic principles and pieces of research that can help.
Liberals and conservatives alike love—and fear—the idea of giving free money to everyone. But we have to try it anyway.
Author: Joi Ito BY
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A lot of people worry about overpopulation, but maybe it’s population decline we should worry about instead?
- Norwegian version: Menneskeheten kan risikere å dø ut hvis vi ikke utvikler livsforlengende teknologier
In earlier times, population growth was limited by the fact that the majority of children died before they were old enough to have children themselves. Illness and lack of resources has probably contributed greatly to the high childhood mortality. Today our technology is better, and so we are able to utilize the Earth’s resources more efficiently, and now, luckily, most people survive childhood. This has led to a population explosion. The greater number of people has led to faster technological progress, which is making room for still more people, and so on — a virtuous circle that helps to give human beings a better standard of living.
But as we have gotten better standards of living, the number of children we get has declined. Just during the last 50 years, the number of children born per woman (fertility rate) has more than halved from 4.9 to less than 2.4 worldwide: