Lifeboat Foundation

US based Phononic’s thermoelectric technology is proving truly disruptive in the usually staid world of cooling technology.

When it comes to cooling technologies it’s fair to say that not a lot has changed in the past 100 years. Today, however, Phononic, a US company based in North Carolina, is using solid-state microchips to reinvent how devices are cooled.

“Over the past 50 years, semiconductors have totally transformed areas as diverse as data, communications, solar power and LED lighting,” says Alex Guichard, senior products marketing manager, Phononic. “Today, we’re using thermoelectric coolers to offer a radical alternative to traditional forms of cooling technology.”

Ellen Swallow Richards was not going to be intimidated by a room full of health experts and officials. Children were dying and their parents, Boston’s taxpayers, and city officials were to blame. The tiny, square-chinned woman thought nothing of climbing over boulders in petticoats, collecting thousands of water samples by horseback, or exploring mines on her honeymoon. So when she took the podium at the 1896 meeting of the American Public Health Association, she wasted no time in laying out her evidence.

More than 5,000 cases of illness could be attributed to the illegal conditions in Boston’s public schools, she said. Buildings lacked ventilation. Sewer pipes were still open. Toilets were filthy. Some 41 percent of the floors had never been washed. Only 27 of the city’s 168 schools had fire escapes that worked. Fully half of Boston’s schoolhouses were “deleterious to health.” The public and parents should be charged with “the murder of some 200 children per year,” Richards declared, their deaths entirely preventable from environmental hazards.

The strident, accusatory tone of Richards’ speech was remarkable, given how tactful she had been in the first two decades of her career. That tact had been a coping strategy, characteristic of a pragmatic feminism. Richards had been the first woman admitted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the university’s first woman instructor. To blend in, she made a conscious effort to appear as unthreatening and feminine as she possibly could to her male colleagues. She even mended their clothes when they asked.

Listen up, pet owners! Earlier this summer, several dogs in North Carolina, Georgia, and Texas perished after coming into contact with toxic blue-green algae. Although this may seem pretty far from home, it’s really a countrywide problem. The same toxic algae has even been spotted in Nevada, so you’ll definitely want to be on the lookout for this nasty stuff. Not only can it cause a variety of symptoms in humans, but it’s considered deadly for animals. Keep reading and learn how you can keep an eye out for algal blooms and keep your pets safe during your adventures.

Had you heard about this toxic blue-green algae that’s already killed several dogs this year? This stuff definitely isn’t to be taken lightly.

Down the road

The end game for quantum computing is a fully functional, universal fault-tolerant gate computer. To fulfill its promise, it needs thousands, maybe even millions, of qubits that can run arbitrary quantum algorithms and solve extremely complex problems and simulations.

Before we can build a quantum machine like that, we have a lot of development work to be done. In general terms, we need:

For example, the embryos of mice that had been impregnated at the same time and then irradiated at the same time all developed the same foot deformity. The embryos that were radiated a day later all had a different foot deformity. A third group of mice, radiated on a different day, all had short tails.

Through extrapolation, Dr. Russell determined that in humans, developing fetuses were most vulnerable to radiation during the mother’s first seven weeks of pregnancy. Because women generally don’t know right away whether they are pregnant, Dr. Russell recommended that non-urgent diagnostic X-rays be taken in the 14 days after the onset of a woman’s menstrual period. Women don’t ovulate for those two weeks, so Dr. Russell reasoned that they could not become pregnant and doctors could avoid potentially causing harm to a fetus by using radiation.

That recommendation was adopted around the world and is the reason doctors, before taking X-rays, ask women of childbearing age if they are pregnant or if they think they might be pregnant.

A MASSIVE asteroid comparable to the massive space rock which brought the dinosaurs’ reign on Earth to an end is hurtling towards Earth, and scientists have confirmed it is “potentially hazardous”.

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A letter was recently published in Nature on 329,000 young people identifying 74 genetic variants—spelling mistakes in single nucleotides in the six billion letter human genome—which can be used to predict nearly 20 percent of the variation in school years completed, a quantitative trait of fortitude which is correlated to general intelligence, and which you can learn about by sequencing your own genome.

Staple that to your college application.

Even before the “molecular age,” we were on guard for the slightest tips that show we are more or less valued than our peers. But there was also caution from the academics that there was actually very little we could do to leverage our biology for improvement. In 1924, the Harvard geneticist William Castle quipped that “we are scarcely as yet in a position to do more than make ourselves ridiculous in this matter. We are no more in a position to control eugenics than the tides of the ocean.”

One day, who knows when, artificial intelligence could hollow out the job market. But for now, it is generating relatively low-paying jobs. The market for data labeling passed $500 million in 2018 and it will reach $1.2 billion by 2023, according to the research firm Cognilytica. This kind of work, the study showed, accounted for 80% of the time spent building AI technology.

Is the work exploitative? It depends on where you live and what you’re working on. In India, it is a ticket to the middle class. In New Orleans, it’s a decent enough job. For someone working as an independent contractor, it is often a dead end.

There are skills that must be learned — like spotting signs of a disease in a video or medical scan or keeping a steady hand when drawing a digital lasso around the image of a car or a tree. In some cases, when the task involves medical videos, pornography or violent images, the work turns grisly.