Linklist: November 23, 2021
"The first time I cooked rice by myself, at five years old, I burned it to a tarry blackness. My mother saw how much I loved to āhelpā her in the kitchen, so she bought me a clay cookpot and a small sack of rice to play with. I ran to visit my friend Yet, who lived in the village behind my parentsā house in Battambang, Cambodia. We gathered branches and stones and built a fire in front of her house, constructed of bamboo and grass mixed with elephant dung.
As the rice simmered, Yet and I sat on the rungs of the steep entry stairs and stoked the fire while we clapped our hands and sang. I left the rice on the fire for a long time, to be sure it was well done, then ran home and presented it to my mother ā āMae,ā as I called her in Khmer.
āThis is tasty!ā Mae exclaimed, smiling. āThe best Iāve ever had!ā The rice was inedible, but it hardly mattered: I had cooked something, and my mother had praised me. For the rest of the day, I floated above the ground.
It amazes me to recall a time when we had so much rice to spare, we could afford to let a little girl blacken it just for fun. Even now that I have plenty to eat, I cannot bear to waste a single bite of food.
The memory of hunger is a curse that never leaves you.
***
In 1975, the Khmer Rouge informed the Cambodian people that we had no history, but we knew it was a lie. Cambodia has a rich past, a mosaic of flavors from near and far: South Indian traders gave us Buddhism and spicy curries; China brought rice noodles and astrology; and French colonizers passed on a love of strong coffee, flan, and a light, crusty baguette. We lifted the best tastes from everywhere and added our own: sour pickled fruits and vegetables, the famous Kampot peppercorn, and the most distinctive flavor (and aroma) of all: prahok, Cambodiaās (in)famous, stinking fermented fish paste.
Even now, I can taste my own history, in shimmering sense-memories of my motherās homemade fish sauce, the delicious soup noodles she rolled out in her hands, one by one, and my favorite of allāthe pĆ¢tĆ© de foie she served to special guests.
One occupying force tried to erase it all."
"Eagerly awaited results of the largest-ever study of psilocybin were announced Tuesday, with Compass Pathways revealing the psychedelic drug was highly efficacious as a therapy for treatment-resistant depression. Still, the companyās stock price dropped 16.4% by the close of trading, perhaps because of safety concerns among investors.
The Phase 2b study is the largest randomized, controlled, double-blind trial of psilocybin, the psychedelic compound in magic mushrooms. The company said it found that patients who were given the highest dose, 25 milligrams, had a significant decrease in depressive symptoms compared to those given 1 milligram, which is such a low dose it functions as a placebo.
Overall, 29.1% of patients in the highest-dose group were in remission three weeks after treatment, compared to 7.6% of those in the control group, and more than a quarter of the patients in the 25-milligram arm were still in remission three months after treatment."
"On September 28, one small bird completed a very long flight. An adult, male Bar-tailed Godwit, known by its tag number 4BBRW, touched down in New South Wales, Australia, after more than 8,100 miles in transit from Alaska āflapping its wings for 239 hours without rest, and setting the world record for the longest continual flight by any land bird by distance. And 4BBRW isnāt even done yet. In the next few days, the Godwit is expected to end its southbound migration in New Zealand after its well-earned island stopover, says Adrian Riegen, a builder from West Auckland and a passionate birdwatcher.
From his home office, usually reserved for managing building projects, Riegen keeps tabs on 4BBRW and 19 other Bar-tailed Godwits fitted with solar-powered location trackers. During migration season, he spends at least an hour each morning going through the most recent location data and writes a daily report for the ongoing project, run by the PÅ«korokoro Miranda Shorebird Center, an education and research nonprofit in Miranda, New Zealand, where many Godwits spend non-breeding months. All of the best tidbits he compiles are disseminated to the centerās followers on Facebook and Twitter, so that people can follow along with the birdsā cross-hemisphere, trans-oceanic journeysāspeed bumps and all. āIt's such an amazing story,ā Riegen says. āWe want to share it as widely as we can.āĀ
Although 4BBRWās feat is astounding, it may not be particularly surprising. Bar-tailed Godwits are incredible migrants: Individuals have broken the ālongest, non-stop, migrationā record more than once since satellite tracking began in 2007 and regularly make continuous flights of more than 7,000 miles."
"It turns out that you don't need a lot of hardware to make a flying robot. Flying robots are usually way, way, way over-engineered, with ridiculously over the top components like two whole wings or an obviously ludicrous four separate motors. Maybe that kind of stuff works for people with more funding than they know what to do with, but for anyone trying to keep to a reasonable budget, all it actually takes to make a flying robot is one single airfoil plus an attached fixed-pitch propeller. And if you make that airfoil flexible, you can even fold the entire thing up into a sort of flying robotic swiss roll.
This type of drone is called a monocopter, and the design is very generally based on samara seeds, which are those single-wing seed pods that spin down from maple trees. The ability to spin slows the seeds' descent to the ground, allowing them to spread farther from the tree. It's an inherently stable design, meaning that it'll spin all by itself and do so in a stable and predictable way, which is a nice feature for a drone to haveāif everything completely dies, it'll just spin itself gently down to a landing by default.
The monocopter we're looking at here, called F-SAM, comes from the Singapore University of Technology & Design, and we've written about some of their flying robots in the past, including this transformable hovering rotorcraft. F-SAM stands for Foldable Single Actuator Monocopter, and as you might expect, it's a monocopter that can fold up and uses just one single actuator for control."
"Betamethasone is a potent topical corticosteroid medication habitually used to treat a wide range of skin conditions, including psoriasis and eczema, but one of the potential side effects is lightening of the skin.
Creams containing Betamethasone should only be used on the advice of a doctor and are typically acquired with a prescription. But in India, as CNN learned from doctors and users around the country, Betamethasone, and other corticosteroid creams, are regularly being misused as a skin lightening agent -- mostly by women.
In 2003, when Banik was just 14, a neighbor told her mother how much their child had ābenefittedā from becoming āfairā by using a new cream. āYour daughter will also become fair,ā they said.
Wanting Banik to have the best prospects in a country where lighter skin is seen as desirable and associated with success, Banikās mother took her neighborās advice. āI was disappointed that it came in a tube so unappealingly medicated,ā Banik recalls, ābut it held the secrets toward my fairer future.ā
School friends were the first to notice, commenting on Banikās newly acquired āgood looks,ā but within two months of using the steroid cream, she started to feel a burning sensation whenever she was out in the sun. She says she accepted this as part of the process: no pain, no fairness.
But one morning, the teenager forgot to apply the cream and within hours, a zit appeared on her chin. Though it quickly settled on applying the cream, Banikās face started itching all the time. She soon developed acne and then, a year after the zit appeared, hair began to grow all over her face."
"Tiny hidden spy cameras concealed in sensitive locations including hotels and bathrooms are becoming a significant threat worldwide. These hidden cameras are easily purchasable and are extremely difficult to find with the naked eye due to their small form factor. The state-of-the-art solutions that aim to detect these cameras are limited as they require specialized equipment and yield low detection rates. Recent academic works propose to analyze the wireless traffic that hidden cameras generate. These proposals, however, are also limited because they assume wireless video streaming, while only being able to detect the presence of the hidden cameras, and not their locations. To overcome these limitations, we present LAPD, a novel hidden camera detection and localization system that leverages the time-of-flight (ToF) sensor on commodity smartphones. We implement LAPD as a smartphone app that emits laser signals from the ToF sensor, and use computer vision and machine learning techniques to locate the unique reflections from hidden cameras. We evaluate LAPD through comprehensive real-world experiments by recruiting 379 participants and observe that LAPD achieves an 88.9% hidden camera detection rate, while using just the naked eye yields only a 46.0% hidden camera detection rate."
ā»ļø Plastic Scanner.
"Plastic pollution is a well-known problem worldwide, and is still growing. It negatively affects humans and wildlife through animal death, groundwater pollution and incorporation of micro plastics in our digestive system. There are many initiatives focusing on reducing the negative effects of plastic pollution, but the amount of plastic consumed and the subsequent pollution is still increasing every year. Additionally, in the current COVID-19 pandemic the dependency on single-use plastics has increased exponentially.
That is why it is important to keep improving recycling infrastructure, especially in low and middle-income countries. Their plastic waste management is often informal, and tools are insufficient for the correct management of plastic waste, resulting in plastic pollution.The research conducted in this thesis showed that especially t he sorting stage of the plastic recycling process is very time consuming and labor-intensive. This discovery led to the central research question: which resources can be developed to accelerate the process of plastic sorting for informal recyclers?
Discrete near-infrared spectroscopy makes it possible to identify over 75% of all plastic used in everyday life. Therefore, it became my mission to make this technology accessible to recyclers in low and middle-income countries.
By applying principles of context variation, local manufacturing and open development in the design process, tools that accelerate the sorting of plastic waste were created. This brings Plastic Identification Anywhere another step closer, with the end goal of fighting plastic pollution, together, today.
The project described in this paper resulted in a complete ecosystem of open-source resources (figure 1) that can be used to implement near-infrared spectroscopy in any plastic waste management setting, especially in low and middle-income countries."
"The two assertions illuminate a thorny, essential question that has been bubbling into greater awareness: How should doctors safely care for patients who have been on high-dose opioids for years? Thereās a push to lower opioid levels amid the countryās addiction crisis, but advocates and experts agree that mismanaged dose reductions ā whether too aggressive or too broadly implemented ā introduce new, serious harms. Not only can they lead to resurgent pain or withdrawal, advocates say, but they can drive people to seek out illicit opioids or to take their own lives.
Cases like Sloneās are complex, experts told STAT, involving vulnerable patients and high doses of potentially dangerous drugs. But too often, they warned, people who rely on these medications are seeing them taken away under the guise that it will make them safer, when instead it can endanger them.
At the trial, the jury agreed. The panel found the physicians and pain clinic at fault and awarded the family nearly $7 million, with $3 million allocated for Sloneās daughter, who was 12 when her father died.
Researchers stress that attributing suicide to a single cause is difficult. In these situations, patients often have multiple risk factors ā including opioid use itself, chronic pain, and accompanying mental health issues.
Still, Sloneās case is notable because it appears to be the first time a jury sided with a patient whose opioid medication was, in their eyes, improperly withheld. It is a sign of the growing recognition that after a reckoning over the damage wrought by prescription opioids, the pendulum swung too far back in certain cases and left another group of people with chronic pain at risk. The message is starting to come from the highest levels, with federal health authorities upping their warnings in recent years about the harms of unsafe dose reductions and stoppages."