Links for 2022-06-26
“Every so often, our star fires off a plasma bomb in a random direction...If just nine transformers were to blow out in the wrong places, the US could experience coast-to-coast outages for months.” https://www.wired.com/story/sun-storm-end-civilization/
“A new study calculates that exposure to car exhaust from leaded gas during childhood stole a collective 824 million IQ points from more than 170 million Americans alive today, about half the population of the United States.” https://today.duke.edu/2022/03/lead-exposure-last-century-shrunk-iq-scores-half-americans
"EU was planning a new initiative that...decrease poorer nations' reliance on Russian fertilisers by helping them develop...fertiliser plants. But [not do because] would be inconsistent with the EU energy and environment policies, officials said." https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/eu-split-over-fertiliser-plants-poorer-nations-food-crisis-bites-2022-06-20/
“It turns out that this machine learning system is much smarter than we thought; it contains very complex forms of knowledge, and this knowledge is organized in a very intuitive structure,” https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/computers-understand-complex-words
Quantum computer programming for dummies: Deep-diving guide explains the basics, surveys major quantum algorithms and steps through implementing them on publicly available quantum computers https://discover.lanl.gov/news/0614-quantum-computer
A japanese company is publishing their total fertility rate to show they are family-friendly https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14612884
“MIT engineers devise a recipe for improving any autonomous robotic system. A new general-purpose optimizer can speed up the design of walking robots, self-driving vehicles, and other autonomous systems.” https://news.mit.edu/2022/optimize-autonomous-robot-0621
Why This Fusion Tech May Be a Geothermal Energy Breakthrough https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8sjdOjNxIE
In 2021 China has announced plans to build 150 new civilian reactors until 2035: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-11-02/china-climate-goals-hinge-on-440-billion-nuclear-power-plan-to-rival-u-s