“Here, rare earth extraction cleared 90 percent efficiency, taking 67 hours to get there. By contrast, leaching didn’t max out until 130 hours after extraction started, and its maximum efficiency was only 60 percent. Again, the extraction that used electricity had fewer contaminating metals.”

“Twitter encourages a very extractive attitude from everyone it touches. The people re-publishing my Mastodon posts on Twitter didn’t think to ask whether I was ok with them doing that. The librarians wondering loudly about how this ‘new’ social media environment could be systematically archived didn’t ask anyone whether they want their fediverse posts to be captured and stored by government institutions.”

“[M]y professional bias influences my priorities: Ensure the vulnerable around us (like grandparents) do not end up in the hospital with COVID-19 (or flu or RSV). This means we are going to do everything in our power to break transmission chains before gathering for the holidays.”

“The cities that had a US embassy that set up one of these monitors and tweeted out air-quality data saw a decrease of PM2.5 particulates to the tune of 2 to 4 micrograms per cubic meter—compared to their air quality before getting the monitor and to other similar cities that do not have a monitor.”

“Knowing that these two impacts generated events allowed for a direct comparison between the estimates and the impact location. And it turns out the estimates are quite good. One event was estimated at 3,530 ± 360 km away, and it turned out to be 3,460 km from the lander, a difference of just 70 km.”

“Kodak slowly began to fix this bias in its film, but not out of any sense of racial injustice: it was a response to complaints from furniture makers and chocolate sellers that Kodak cameras couldn’t properly capture their products’ hues.”

“It feels like a bait and switch: my loyalty in buying products that are better for me as a user is being tested because shareholders need to see more services revenue. … [I]t will feel a little bit scummier every time I go to download an app or get directions.”

“As you become familiar with common LEGO parts, you should try sorting them into categories based on their type. A good place to start would be to separate ‘Bricks’, ‘Plates’, and ‘Other’ LEGO parts into three different containers.”

“Some outspoken teachers have lost their licenses. Many others have received warnings after being anonymously accused of saying the wrong thing. Their so-called crimes are often vague, which encourages those who want to avoid their fate to attend to every possible aspect of their lives that might bring disapproval.”

“[Leasing] agents sometimes hesitated to push rents higher. Roper said they were often peers of the people they were renting to. ‘We said there’s way too much empathy going on here,’ he said. ‘This is one of the reasons we wanted to get pricing off-site.'”

“Whenever COVID-19 cases doubled, climate-related tweets dropped by about 5 percent. The doubling of COVID-19 deaths saw climate tweeting decline by over 7 percent. … [A] big boost in case counts could easily offset the arrival of a major hurricane.”

“For years, many linguists have believed that learning language is impossible without a built-in grammar template. The new AI models … demonstrate that the ability to produce grammatical language can be learned from linguistic experience alone.”

“[P]eople who were homozygous (had two copies) of this protective gene variant involved in antigen presentation were 40 percent more likely to survive the plague than those with two copies of a deleterious variant, which encodes a broken protein.”

“Semafor’s dinky plan to publish duller, subhead-laden versions of whatever you can read in the Times or Politico is the sort of unserious half-measure that would only sound good to the class of people who write checks for this kind of thing.”

“American and British military officials [helped] to hone the Ukrainians’ strategy. ‘We have algorithms and methodologies that are more sophisticated when it comes to things like mapping out logistics and calculating munitions rates,’ a senior official at the Defense Department said. ‘The idea was not to tell them what to do but, rather, to give them different runs to test their plans.'”