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30 Pieces of silver for the masses.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) just published a report titled Fossil Fuel Foolery, which identified 10 tactics that the fossil fuel industry used as excuses for not accepting accountability for its impacts on the environment and human health. DesmogBlog noted that the industry used a long list of deceptive tactics that concealed environmental destruction harming Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) as well as low-income communities. Not surprising — the fossil fuel industry only cares about money, and if the planet and human health stand in the way of that, so be it.

The article gave a snapshot of the report findings, and one of the most disturbing things I took notice of was the common tactic that the NAACP described as “co-opt community leaders and organizations and misrepresent the interests and opinions of communities,” sometimes with financial support, to “neutralize or weaken public opposition.”

In short, fossil fuel companies and utilities pour donations on churches, nonprofits, and advocacy organizations to pretty much secure the local community buy-in on projects that generate pollution. The article said it plainly: “to stifle the push towards renewable energy.” And that also includes misrepresenting the community through one or two hired hands.

Continue reading “The Fossil Fuel Industry Used Deception To Conceal Damage To BIPOC — NAACP Report” | >

Extract from a conversation that María Blasco, Director of the Spanish National Cancer Research Center (CNIO for its acronym in Spanish) had with Mario Alonso Puig during the celebration of the South Summit 2020.

In this segment María Blasco refers to aging, cancer, telomerase, and life extension. The conversation is in English and I added subtitles in Spanish.

I find the message particularly important because Dr. María Blasco refers again (she already did it in a scientific paper) to the fact that, contrary to what she herself would have expected and was a concern within the scientific community, inducing the production of Telomerase in mice, besides from lengthening significantly their healthspan and lifespan, not only it did not cause Cancer but quite the opposite, reduced or even eliminated the occurrence of it.

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While a Mars rover can explore where no person has gone before, a smaller robot at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia could climb to new heights by mimicking the movements of a lizard.

Simply named X-4, the university’s climbing has allowed a team of researchers to test and replicate how a lizard moves in the hope that their findings will inspire next-generation robotics design for disaster relief, remote surveillance and possibly even space exploration.

In a published today in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the team states that have optimized their movement across difficult terrain over many years of evolution.

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Access to clean water is a huge issue across the globe. Even in areas with water resources, a lack of infrastructure or reliable energy means purifying that water is sometimes extremely difficult.

That’s why a vapor designed by University at Buffalo and University of Wisconsin-Madison engineers could be revolutionary. Unlike other radiative vapor condensers which can only operate at night, the new design works in direct sunlight and requires no energy input.

“We have worked on solar-driven water evaporation technologies in the past years,” says Qiaoqiang Gan, Ph.D., professor of electrical engineering at UB and a leading corresponding author. “We are now addressing the second half of the water cycle, condensation.”

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Data affecting more than 500 million Facebook users that was originally leaked in 2019, including email addresses and phone numbers, has been posted on an online hackers forum, according to media reports and a cybercrime expert.

“All 533000, 000 Facebook records were just leaked for free,” Alon Gal, at the Hudson Rock cybercrime intelligence firm, said Saturday on Twitter.

He denounced what he called the “absolute negligence” of Facebook.

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Robot swarms have, to date, been constructed from artificial materials. Motile biological constructs have been created from muscle cells grown on precisely shaped scaffolds. However, the exploitation of emergent self-organization and functional plasticity into a self-directed living machine has remained a major challenge. We report here a method for generation of in vitro biological robots from frog (Xenopus laevis) cells. These xenobots exhibit coordinated locomotion via cilia present on their surface. These cilia arise through normal tissue patterning and do not require complicated construction methods or genomic editing, making production amenable to high-throughput projects.

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Google has announced an update to its Developer Program Policy that will help to prevent applications from viewing which other apps are installed on an Android device. The company states that they consider installed apps to be private user information and therefore, aim to protect Android users by keeping this data secure.

That is to say, Google will limit which apps can request the QUERY_ALL_PACKAGES permission, presently mandatory for application targeting API level 30 (Android 11) and above that wish to query the list of application a user has installed for an Android 11 or later .

From now on, the QUERY_ALL_PACKAGES permission will only be available when the core functionality of an app in question must query any of the device’s installed applications. Therefore, in order to dispute this , developers will have to provide reasonable evidence for how querying the API of an Android devices installed applications is absolutely necessary in order for that device to properly function.

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