54080547
submission
turning in circles writes:
Those of us in boring midwest towns everybody's heard of, but nobody's visited, such as Indianapolis, take great comfort in the fact that whatever happens on the coasts, we're too small potatoes to matter. Al Qaeda won't bomb us. NSA won't snoop on us. Dull factor 100%. But maybe that's not so. Our state police just bought a device for tracking all the metadata for our cell phones whenever they like. And it was, all things considered, pretty cheap. Small town America, it's time to get scared.
52007573
submission
turning in circles writes:
Medical researchers have found that rats prefer Oreos to rice cakes about as much as they prefer cocaine or morphine. The levels of pleasure-recognizing proteins in the rats' brains actually increased more for Oreos than cocaine. More studies like this, and maybe studies with McDonald's french fries, might further open the debate about the extent to which obesity is a medical condition vs a personal preference.
50770855
submission
turning in circles writes:
For some time, physicists have used perovskites embedded in silicon in a complex nanostructure to fabricate a new class of solar cells. These were tricky to build and not much more efficient than normal silicon semiconductors. However, some of these same physicists just realized that if they build solar cells with perovskites alone, using a flat, simple process, efficiency is 50% better than silicon semiconductors and fabrication costs are about the same. Who says simplify only applies to people who shop at Whole Foods and people who write code?
