Every day, the same, again

The first South African doctor to alert the authorities about patients with the omicron variant has told The Telegraph that the symptoms of the new variant are unusual but mild. […] They included young people with intense fatigue and a six-year-old child with a very high pulse rate. None suffered from a loss of taste or smell.

why we won’t know for weeks how dangerous Omicron is

“What’s the process to add additional presidents to Mount Rushmore?”, a Trump admin official reportedly asked. — Sculpture of Donald Trump’s face carved into Mount Rushmore has been pictured at his office in Mar-a-Lago

New plastic made from DNA is biodegradable and easy to recycle

“It is currently possible to drive a mid-size electric car 1.8 million kilometres using the same energy it takes to mine one single Bitcoin” Europe must ban Bitcoin mining to hit the 1.5C Paris climate goal, say Swedish regulators

In the early 2010s, the leading music-intelligence company was the Echo Nest, which Spotify acquired in 2014. Founded in the MIT Media Lab in 2005, the Echo Nest developed algorithms that could measure recorded music using a set of parameters similar to Serrà’s, including ones with clunky names like acousticness, danceability, instrumentalness, and speechiness. To round out their models, the algorithms could also scour the internet for and semantically analyze anything written about a given piece of music. The goal was to design a complete fingerprint of a song: to reduce music to data to better guide consumers to songs they would enjoy. By the time Spotify bought the Echo Nest, it claimed to have analyzed more than 35 million songs, using a trillion data points. […] The result is that users keep encountering similar content because the algorithms keep recommending it to us.

“Ghost particles” detected in the Large Hadron Collider for first time

The Pigeon Puzzle: How Do They Figure Out Their Impossibly Long Routes Home?

Back when it was normal to advertise cocaine gadgets in magazines, 1970-1980