This week I’ve seen a lot of stuff in different fields: biology, material science, computer science, tech, art… let’s take a look:
Dig it!
Really interesting read on an experiment that has been in development since 1879. The big question here is: how long can seeds last before not being able to germinate? The answer is more tricky than you might think, because even if today we cannot make something grow, we don’t really know if in some years technology could do it… Anyway, I also liked the mystique going around the experiment, as the number of researches that know the location of the seeds is super small, and they dig out every few years in total secret.
One of the World’s Oldest Science Experiments Comes Up From the Dirt, on The New York Times
Shut up and take my money!
NFTs keep being sent, the planet keeps dying. Now half a million dollars for a meme. What a time to be alive.
The World Knows Her as ‘Disaster Girl.’ She Just Made $500,000 Off the Meme, on The New York Times
Put the glasses on!
Apple keeps doing movements with regard to user security and the data that other companies have access to. However, many people are actively fighting against it with everything they got. While its early to say, everything seems to be going into a good direction, at least when compared to the crazy habits that we adopted during the last decade. Quite interesting topic here, I will definitely follow any updates.
Apple And Tracking: A Story Of Good Guys And Bad Guys, on Forbes
Welcome to the world of… yesterday?
Amazing video of London during the 30s and the 40s, colorized by means of Artificial Inteligence. You can read more about it in the nice article on OpenCulture.
Paint it white!
New advances in fabrication keep providing materials with better and better properties. In this case, some researchers at Purdue University have achieved a material that reflects up to 98.1% of the sunlight it receives. This is pretty cool when you think about it, as having higher albedo keeps things cooler, which is something we are going to need in the near future…
The whitest paint is here – and it’s the coolest. Literally. on purdue.edu
How a good design can push you to new heights: The Power of Video Game HUDs
Mark Brown released a video this week on Game Maker’s Toolkit, his channel on videogame design. This time he talks about the design of the Heads-Up Display (HUD). Something I really enjoyed is they way he describes how the decisions you make on its design affect not only the way players approach the game, but also how they understand or interact with it. I think there is a really cool concept there that transcends to many different platforms. In my case, they way I design figures for a conference presentation or a manuscript affects the way the readers will approach the subject I try to explain, and thinking about it is key to success. It also highlights that depending on the format, you might need to use different approaches to design, as sometimes what really works for a relaxed read does not work at all for a live talk.
And that’s it for the week. Stay safe!
PS: Paddington 2 is now officially the best movie ever done. At last.
kg.
, calculation that gives us a total pressure on the base of the wall of ~1.9 Mega Pascals (MPa). Here, the problem with ice is that at high pressure, it melts. This is why glaciers move around, because the ice on their base becames water, and then the ice on top starts to flow in any direction. The question now becomes, would the pressure on the wall make if flow around? The answer seems to be a big YES: usually glaciers start to flow with pressures on their base of 0.1 MPa, so the wall would exert a pressure about one order of magnitude higher than that. You can read a little more on the forces and movements that generate glacier dynamics 
F. Soldevila 