A Range of Synthetic Smog Recipes
"This afternoon, the Center for Genomic Gastronomy and I will be offering New Yorkers a chance to taste aeroir, with a side-by-side tasting of air from different cities. With the support of the Finnish Cultural Institute in New York, we have spent the past few months designing and fabricating a smog-tasting cart, complete with built-in smog chamber, as well as developing a range of synthetic smog recipes."
2. The FBI's forensic DNA database, which has been in use since 1999, has problems.
"The FBI has notified crime labs across the country that it has discovered errors in data used by forensic scientists in thousands of cases to calculate the chances that DNA found at a crime scene matches a particular person, several people familiar with the issue said. The bureau has said it believes the errors, which extend to 1999, are unlikely to result in dramatic changes that would affect cases. It has submitted the research findings to support that conclusion for publication in the July issue of the Journal of Forensic Sciences, the officials said. But crime labs and lawyers said they want to know more about the problem before conceding it would not make much difference in any given case."
3. Perhaps the world's strangest border.
"The other week I crossed the international border from the Netherlands into the Belgian village of Baarle-Hertog. I continued walking in a straight line. A few minutes later I walked out of the other side of Baarle-Hertog, back into the Dutch village of Baarle-Nassau. Baarle-Hertog is an enclave, a chunk of Belgium completely surrounded by the Netherlands. The main Dutch-Belgian border lies nearly 5 km to the south of here. Baarle isn't a simple enclave either. It is a cluster of twenty-two different Belgian land parcels inside the Netherlands. And inside two of the larger Belgian enclaves are seven Dutch counter-enclaves (an enclave within another enclave). Pockets of the Netherlands nested inside Belgium, nestled inside the Netherlands."
4. This 19th-century French scientist was a badass.
"Over the next two decades, Villepreux-Power studied the island’s wildlife, corresponding with top naturalists of the time and eventually writing two guides to Sicily. 'Way ahead of her time,' Scales writes, 'she came up with the idea of restocking overfished rivers with fish and crayfish.' And she documented tool use in Octopus vulgaris, describing how the animal could use stones to wedge open Pinna nobilis shells. Her most significant cephalopod work was on Argonauta argo, the paper nautilus. Some scientists thought that this species must steal its shells from other animals, but Villepreux-Power showed through a series of experiments that the paper nautilus actually secretes its own shell material. That lets the creature add onto its shell as it grows and repair the shell if it breaks (or a scientist comes along and breaks off a piece). And to do these studies, Villepreux-Power first had to invent the modern aquarium."
5. The people who think they are made of glass.
"Vanitas Machine has been specifically developed to keep a candle 'alive' under controlled conditions. As the candle burns down, sensors and the air outlet port follow the position of the flame. The system protects it from environmental factors and by precisely regulating the oxygen supply the 'metabolism' of the candle and thus its 'lifespan' is extended."
On Fusion: The American coal industry is collapsing: in the last five years, the combined market value of the top four coal companies has fallen from $21.7 billion to $1.2 billion.
I've suspended my word of the day, purely for time's sake. Perhaps it will return as my workload rebalances!
1. ediblegeography.com 2. washingtonpost.com | @thegrugq 3. iamdanw.com | @golan 4. sciencenews.org 5. bbc.com
A Range of Synthetic Smog Recipes