Selling new islands, 5G, 3D-printing resin, the genius of the waddle, female DJs
Latest“The island, about 65 kilometres south-west of the main island of Tongatapu and the nation’s capital, Nuku’alofa, started forming in January after a volcano began erupting. Hotel owner GP Orbassano, together with a friend and his son, arrived at one of the island’s three beaches on Saturday. The group proceeded to climb to the highest point of the island’s crater, believed to be approximately 250 metres high… Mr Orbassano believed those in his group were the first people to set foot on the island. He said the island had great potential to attract tourists. ‘It’s going to be amazing for tourists to go on top, it’s a really different experience and it’s not so far away [from the capital],’ he said.”
2. It might take some years, but this is what mobile data service will eventually look like.
“According to Huawei, 5G will allow you to download an eight gigabyte HD movie in six seconds versus the seven minutes it would take over 4G or more than an hour on 3G. But 5G is much more than just faster data speeds on your mobile devices. It also opens the door to a lot of different consumer and industrial applications and uses — some of which seem unbelievable now because they’re so futuristic. For example, Ulrich Dropmann, head of industry environment networks at Nokia, gave a scenario where you might be cruising in your driverless car when, unbeknownst to you, a crash has just occurred up the road. With 5G, sensors placed along the road would be able to instantly relay that information back to your car (this is where having low latency is important), so it could brake earlier and avoid another accident.”
“The Ember 3D printer ships with 2 liters of our Standard Clear Prototyping resin. We affectionately call it PR48, which stands for polar resin number 48. Like WD-40, is this our 48th try for a polar resin formulation? Close enough. Today we’re sharing the formulation of PR48 under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, the same license Arduino uses to share their design files. We’re explicitly inviting you to understand, remix, and remake our resin.”
4. The surprising genius of the penguin waddle.
“They persuaded five emperor penguins to walk over a force plate and found, to their surprise, that the birds are not wastrels but, rather, relative paragons of economy. As a penguin rocks to one side, it stores the kinetic energy of its swing as potential energy, which it then uses to power its next step. In this way, it recovers eighty per cent of the energy that it expends on each stride, one of the highest values reported for any animal. Why, then, the apparent inefficiency?”
5. Female electronic music makers in the lab.
“female:pressure is an international network of over 1300 female artists from 64 countries in the wider fields of electronic music. This blog was inspired by Bjork’s Pitchfork article in January 2015 where she notes the lack of photographic documentation of women at work in the studio. Here we offer a visual catalogue of female producers, DJ’s, media artists and electronic music performers at work. These are not our press photos. This is a collective effort to demonstrate women and their use of technology in music and media production.”
On Fusion: Your mother’s maiden name has been a ‘security question’ since 1882, Kashmir discovers.
Today’s 1957 American English Usage Tip:
distingué. As used in English, distingué is not equivalent of distinguished, but refers to an elegance of appearance and manner: A distingué person with a genius for looking like a gentleman.
The Credits
1. abc.net.au / @primalux 2. recode.net 3. spark.autodesk.com / @jessicarickson 4. newyorker.com 5. femalepressure.tumblr.com / @laurasterritt
Relative Paragons of Economy