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Work remotely, work more jobs.

With the pandemic’s turbocharged acceleration of remote work options, many employees have sought to capitalize on the lack of personal supervision by secretly working two (or more) full-time jobs at once. But while there’s more money to be made, the strategy brings with it significant tradeoffs, namely mental health.

#Jobs #FutureofWork #BloombergQuicktake.

“The Future of Work” explores how work has changed during the Covid-19 pandemic, and which of these changes are likely here to stay — looking at office spaces, the shift in work culture, managers, & their employees from both a macro & micro level. Check out the rest of the series here: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqq4LnWs3olXfYle__avndejcvzm-hDGA
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Fraunhofer ISE has developed a process for recycling the silicon in old solar panels.

The big knock on new technology like electric cars and solar panels is that they are not recyclable. People haven’t cared a flying fig leaf about recycling stuff for the past 100 years. If they did, citizens would be at the gates of the corporate headquarters of Nestlé, Coca Cola, and Pepsi with flaming torches and pitchforks demanding they stop inundating the Earth with their endless profusion of waste products.

But suddenly, people are all atwitter about what will happen to the batteries of electric cars. Fearmongers on the internet are telling people they will have to drive their old electric cars into lakes and rivers when they stop working. The amazing thing is, people believe that codswallop and repeat it to their friends as if it were carved on the stone tablets Moses brought down with him when he descended the mountain. So much for public education making people smarter.

Another cry you hear from the anti-technology crowd is that millions of old solar panels will be dumped into landfills to fester for centuries. Horse-puckey! Do we need a way to recycle solar panels? Yes, we do. And are responsible adults working on such systems as we speak? Yes, they are. Calm down, people. Everything you read on Twitter or Facebook is not gospel. And let’s not get started on the deliberate misinformation spewed by the talking heads on Faux News 24 hours a day.

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Circa 2020

Autopilot has been around longer than you think. Indeed, in 1914, just 11 years after the Wright Brothers first ushered humanity into the aviation age, a fellow named Lawrence Sperry built a gyroscopic self-stabilization system into a Curtiss C-2. It was capable, he claimed, of keeping an aircraft straight and level and pointed in a consistent direction on the compass, and he put on a spectacular public demonstration at the Seine just outside Paris to prove it.

First, he did a pass by the crowd with his hands clearly up in the air. Then, he did the same with an assistant standing on one of the wings, moving about to throw the weight balance off. Then he made a third pass where both pilot and passenger went out and stood on the wings. The crowd went bananas. Those magnificent men and their flying machines!

But Sperry was not satisfied. Through World War 1, he worked on a number of designs for a fully self-flying aircraft, including the Hewitt-Sperry Automatic Aircraft and the Curtiss-Sperry Flying Bomb, which is regarded by some as an early precursor of today’s cruise missiles. These were never fully successful, and the relevant Wikipedia page makes for some entertaining reading with phrases like “When last seen, the N-9 was cruising over Bayshore Air Station at about 4,000 feet (1,200 m), heading east. It was never seen again.”

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In this episode of UpOnly, the creator of Ethereum Vitalik Buterin talks origin stories, his motivation, the future of Ethereum, and even biological sciences.

Presented by FTX: https://uponyl.tv/ftx.

Full show notes: https://uponly.tv/vitalik-buterin-on-ethereum-and-immortality/

Timestamps.

0:00 — Intro.
1:30 — What does Vitalik do outside of crypto? / The Invention of Language.
5:50 — What did Vitalik imagine himself doing before crypto?
8:57 — OG Canadian Crypto Scene / What do you wish you had done differently?
13:30 — Future Plans Outside of Ethereum.
15:30 — Family and Crypto.
16:50 — Ethereum Alternatives.
20:35 — Proof of Stake / NFTs.
28:15 — Where The Future is Going / Crypto Beyond Financialization.
32:25 — Ethereum Sharding / zk-STARK / MEV
36:10 — User Experience Hurdles / Multisig / Reducing Risk.
41:37 — Who is Satoshi Nakamoto?
43:35 — Donating SHIBA to Charity.
46:25 — Best Vitalik Memes.
50:06 — Multi-Chain Future vs. a Cross-Chain Future / Layer 2 / Systemic Risk.
58:30 — Layer 2 Decentralization.
1:00:05 — Implications of zkEVM
1:04:03 — Archivability of Blockchains.
1:07:14 — Security and Risks / Simplicity of Code / Web Standards.
1:12:25 — Privacy.
1:14:42 — Anti-Aging / Immortality / Adopting New Technology.
1:29:17 — Multi-planetary World / Antarctica / Cultural Shifts.
1:35:40 — Important Social Trends.
1:38:30 — Alpha

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Circa 2021

A ruby that formed in Earth’s crust 2.5 billion years ago encases evidence for early life, wriggling around in the planet’s mud.

Trapped within the precious stone, geologists have identified residue of a form of pure carbon called graphite that, they say, is most likely biological in origin, the remains of some ancient microorganism from the time before multicellular life emerged on Earth.

“The graphite inside this ruby is really unique. It’s the first time we’ve seen evidence of ancient life in ruby-bearing rocks,” said geologist Chris Yakymchuk of the University of Waterloo in Canada.

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It may look like a bizarre bike helmet, or a piece of equipment found in Doc Brown’s lab in Back to the Future, yet this gadget made of plastic and copper wire is a technological breakthrough with the potential to revolutionize medical imaging. Despite its playful look, the device is actually a metamaterial, packing in a ton of physics, engineering, and mathematical know-how.

It was developed by Xin Zhang, a College of Engineering professor of mechanical engineering, and her team of scientists at BU’s Photonics Center. They’re experts in , a type of engineered structure created from small unit cells that might be unspectacular alone, but when grouped together in a precise way, get new superpowers not found in nature. Metamaterials, for instance, can bend, absorb, or manipulate waves—such as electromagnetic waves, , or radio waves. Each unit cell, also called a resonator, is typically arranged in a in rows and columns; they can be designed in different sizes and shapes, and placed at different orientations, depending on which waves they’re designed to influence.

Metamaterials can have many novel functions. Zhang, who is also a professor of electrical and computer engineering, , and and engineering, has designed an acoustic metamaterial that blocks sound without stopping airflow (imagine quieter jet engines and air conditioners) and a magnetic metamaterial that can improve the quality of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines used for medical diagnosis.

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Drone manufacturer and automated flight specialist Skydio says it has won a contract to supply its X2D UAVs to the US Army’s Short-Range Reconnaissance Program (SRR). Valued at $20.2 million annually, the fixed-price provisionment agreement is expected to be worth $99.8 million over its five-year duration.

The fact that the final decision looked closely at feedback from soldiers themselves on overall product performance and quality, meanwhile, is an indicator that the company’s UAVs impressed people from the boots on the ground all the way up to the top brass. The pitch for the contract involved 30 small-scale drone manufacturers, from which Skydio’s craft was judged the most ready to fulfill the US Army’s SRR operational requirements from day one.

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