Surviving another April Fool’s on the web requires effort and some just ignore the Internet for the day. Fortunately, we’ve filtered through all the excessive nonsense to find some true gems in the midst of the silliness.
Enjoy this week’s stories!
COMPUTING: The Death of Moore’s Law Will Spur Innovation
Andrew Huang | IEEE Spectrum
“This slowing of Moore’s Law portends a bright future for many small businesses—and likewise for open-hardware practices…The creation of stable, performance-competitive open platforms will be enabling for small businesses. Such companies can still choose to keep their designs closed, but by doing so they will be forced to create a proprietary infrastructure to support the development of their products and to build on them.”
SPACE: This Scientist Says He Keeps Finding Aliens in the Stratosphere
Jason Koebler | Motherboard
“In fall of 2013, Milton Wainwright, a researcher at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom, made international headlines when he claimed that microorganisms he found in the stratosphere were not of this world. The organisms are believed to come from a class of algae called diatoms, were collected roughly 16 miles above the Earth’s surface using a balloon, and, according to Wainwright, have been raining down on the Earth, carried by meteorites, for perhaps many millennia.”
CHEMISTRY: Widest possible photosynthesis, absorbing any color of sunlight, from oranges through near-infrared
Washington University in St. Louis | Science Daily
“Having learned as much as they could about the native pigments, the group set out to design new pigments that would absorb parts of the [solar] spectrum less utilized or untouched by the native chlorophylls of plants or the bacteriochlorophylls used by photosynthetic bacteria.”
FUTURE OF WORK: AI interns: Software already taking jobs from humans
Hal Hodson | New Scientist
“‘To train the AI, it watches and learns while humans do simple, repetitive database tasks. With enough training data, the AIs can then go to work on their own. ‘They navigate a virtual environment,’ says Jason Kingdon, chairman of Blue Prism, the start-up which developed O2’s artificial workers. ‘They mimic a human. They do exactly what a human does.'”
BRAIN: The Internet doesn’t make you smarter; you only think it does
Cathleen O’Grady | Ars Technica
“There are already indications that we treat the Internet like a transactive memory partner, remembering only where to find information, rather than the content itself. But could we also be blurring the boundary between our own internal knowledge and the easily accessed knowledge available via search engines? A group of researchers at Yale University think that we are.”
VIRTUAL REALITY: Virtual Nose Keeps Gamers From Getting Sick
Emil Venere/Purdue | Futurity
“’It was a stroke of genius,’ says Whittinghill, who teaches video game design. ‘You are constantly seeing your own nose. You tune it out, but it’s still there, perhaps giving you a frame of reference to help ground you.’”
CULTURE: Will You Be Able to Read this Article in 1,000 Years?
David Shultz | Nautilus
“The digitization of data gives it protection from physical catastrophes, but, as it stands now, it’s far from eternal. The problem isn’t so much that the data itself might be lost, but that there will be no way to read it. ”
[image credits: internets_dairy/Flickr]
