5 Intriguing Things
1. India sent a satellite to Mars for only $74 million.
"The Mangalyaan satellite was confirmed to be in orbit shortly after 0800, Indian time. It is, without doubt, a considerable achievement. This is a mission that has been budgeted at 4.5bn rupees ($74m), which, by Western standards, is staggeringly cheap. The American Maven orbiter that arrived at the Red Planet on Monday is costing almost 10 times as much. Back in June, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi even quipped that India's real-life Martian adventure was costing less than the make-believe Hollywood film Gravity." (bbc.com)
2. After people are hit by lightning, they often experience confounding chronic medical problems.
"Even more confounding is that almost no one in the mainstream medical community can explain what’s happening to them. Although many scientists have spent their careers examining the physics of lightning, only a handful of doctors and researchers have devoted themselves to the study of how lightning damages the human body. The incident rates are simply not high enough to warrant an entire subfield of science. Nearly everything we now know about treating lightning victims concerns the immediate wounds, many of which don’t even require special medical knowledge." (outsideonline.com)
3. The tragedy of a lost Ebola ward in Sierra Leone.
"With Khan now very ill, the Kenema hospital was on the verge of collapse. There were too many patients and too few staff to treat them, and supplies were dwindling. Fearing for their lives and feeling ill-equipped to do their jobs, the remaining nurses and lab technicians went on strike. The hospital as a whole had virtually shut down, except for its Ebola work." (nature.com)
"Masdar City is the 'Opening Soon City.' Walking around, there are some seemingly deserted buildings (it's a disturbing experience to enter an empty hall, take an elevator, and discover that each floor is also abandoned), alleyways used by security guards (to protect the abandoned buildings?), or cleaning sites (it is true that the dust from the desert gets everywhere and causes damages to photovoltaic panels on the roofs of the buildings). The loud drone of natural air conditioning, a huge wind tower, is omnipresent, even oppressive. Some students--there are barely a hundred, the only inhabitants in the city--seem lost even though the surface area is small." (fastcoexist.com)
5. "Three questions with a meat brewer"
"Modern Meadow, a startup based in Brooklyn, New York, is aiming to commercialize leather and meat products that are not made from slaughtered animals but brewed in cell-culture vats. If it works, and if the market embraces the resulting products, it would lead to vast savings in water, land, and energy use associated with livestock production." (technologyreview.com)
Today's 1957 American English Language Tip
Oh no! I'm traveling and I forgot my dictionary. Tips will return soon.
Warrant an Entire Subfield