| From: Jon Koplik | 10/5/2020 11:14:45 PM | | | | | | great Nobel prize winner notification story (today.) This is from the WSJ article titled :
Nobel Prize in Medicine Awarded for Discovery of Hepatitis C Virus
<<<<< Dr. Alter said he was in a deep sleep when he heard the phone first ring at 4:15 a.m., and ignored not only the initial call but a second one. By the third call, he said, he “got out of bed rather angrily, figuring this was another political solicitation or someone wanting to extend the warranty on my car.”
It turned out to be from Stockholm, telling him he had won a Nobel Prize. “It’s been quite a morning since that time.” >>>>>
Jon.
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| From: Jon Koplik | 10/22/2020 1:37:54 AM | | | | | | AP News -- Beetle armor gives clues to tougher planes ..........................
Oct. 21, 2020
Can’t crush this: Beetle armor gives clues to tougher planes
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This 2016 photo provided by the University of California, Irvine, shows a diabolical ironclad beetle, which can withstand being crushed by forces almost 40,000 times its body weight and are native to desert habitats in Southern California. Scientists say the armor of the seemingly indestructible beetle could offer clues for designing stronger planes and buildings. In a study published Wednesday, Oct. 21, 2020, in the journal Nature, a group of scientists explains why the beetle is so squash-resistant. (Jesus Rivera, Kisailus Biomimetics and Nanostructured Materials Lab, University of California Irvine via AP)
By MARION RENAULT
NEW YORK (AP) -- It’s a beetle that can withstand bird pecks, animal stomps and even being rolled over by a Toyota Camry. Now scientists are studying what the bug’s crush-resistant shell could teach them about designing stronger planes and buildings.
“This beetle is super tough,” said Purdue University civil engineer Pablo Zavattieri, who was among a group of researchers that ran over the insect with a car as part of a new study.
So, how does the seemingly indestructible insect do it? The species -- aptly named diabolical ironclad beetle -- owes its might to an unusual armor that is layered and pieced together like a jigsaw, according to the study by Zavattieri and his colleagues published in Nature on Wednesday. And its design, they say, could help inspire more durable structures and vehicles.
To understand what gives the inch-long beetle its strength, researchers first tested how much squishing it could take. The species, which can be found in Southern California’s woodlands, withstood compression of about 39,000 times its own weight.
For a 200-pound man, that would be like surviving a 7.8-million-pound crush.
Other local beetle species shattered under one-third as much pressure.
Researchers then used electron microscopes and CT scans to examine the beetle’s exoskeleton and figure out what made it so strong.
As is often the case for flightless beetles, the species’ elytra -- a protective case that normally sheaths wings -- had strengthened and toughened over time. Up close , scientists realized this cover also benefited from special, jigsaw-like bindings and a layered architecture.
When compressed, they found the structure fractured slowly instead of snapping all at once.
“When you pull them apart,” Zavattieri said, “it doesn’t break catastrophically. It just deforms a little bit. That’s crucial for the beetle.”
It could also be useful for engineers who design aircrafts and other vehicles and buildings with a variety of materials such as steel, plastic and plaster. Currently, engineers rely on pins, bolts, welding and adhesives to hold everything together. But those techniques can be prone to degrading.
In the structure of the beetle’s shell, nature offers an “interesting and elegant” alternative, Zavattieri said.
Because the beetle-inspired design fractures in a gradual and predictable way, cracks could be more reliably inspected for safety, said Po-Yu Chen, an engineer at Taiwan’s National Tsing Hua University not involved in the research.
The beetle study is part of an $8 million project funded by the U.S. Air Force to explore how the biology of creatures such as mantis shrimp and bighorn sheep could help develop impact-resistant materials.
“We’re trying to go beyond what nature has done,” said study co-author David Kisailus, a materials scientist and engineer at the University of California, Irvine.
The research is the latest effort to borrow from the natural world to solve human problems, said Brown University evolutionary biologist Colin Donihue, who was not involved in the study. Velcro, for example, was inspired by the hook-like structure of plant burrs. Artificial adhesives took a page from super-clingy gecko feet.
Donihue said endless other traits found in nature could offer insight: “These are adaptations that have evolved over millennia.”
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education.
© Copyright 2020 The Associated Press.
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| From: Jon Koplik | 11/14/2020 6:20:20 PM | | | | | | WSJ piece : video-calling / predicted in 1912 / in 1920s, AT&T began testing ................
Nov. 13, 2020
The Overnight Business Boom That Took a Century
Why a global pandemic transformed videocalling from a technology most people didn’t like to the technology everybody had to have
AT&T displayed its Picturephone at the New York World's Fair in 1964. Photo: AT&T Archives and History Center
By Jason Zweig
To change people’s lives, companies don’t just need disruptive technology. Sometimes they need luck, too.
Consider videocalling. It was developed almost a century ago as a solution for a problem that companies identified but customers didn’t: the need for a machine that would permit face-to-face conversation at any distance.
For decades, dozens of companies kept trying to foist videocalling onto an unready and unwilling public. Then, like a bolt from the blue, the coronavirus thrust nearly everyone into isolation. Videocalling went from a technology most people didn’t like or want to the technology everybody had to have.
Underestimating how important luck can be in determining how fast customers will adopt an innovative technology helps explain the perennial tendency of business forecasters to get the future wrong.
“Before very long,” the engineering journal Cassier’s Magazine predicted in July 1912, “when the telephone call comes, there will appear with it the face of the person who is talking.” That would make it “unnecessary for many people to travel to and from their work at all,” minimizing “the great crush and crowding back and forth in our great cities.”
In the late 1920s, AT&T began testing two-way audio with partial video, called “ Ikonophone,” on local lines in New York. AT&T displayed a prototype at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1933, then tinkered with the concept for decades.
Finally, at the New York World’s Fair in 1964, AT&T displayed its first easily workable device, called the Picturephone, amid enormous hype. Lady Bird Johnson, wife of President Lyndon B. Johnson, inaugurated the service with a call from the White House to New York.
AT&T’s Picturephone made its World’s Fair debut amid enormous hype. Photo: AT&T Archives and History Center
In 1968, Stanley Kubrick’s movie “2001: A Space Odyssey” featured a space-to-Earth video call from an AT&T-branded Picturephone booth onboard the Discovery One spacecraft. The call cost $1.70.
In 1969, Bell Labs executive Julius Molnar predicted that by 2000, “Picturephone will be the primary mode by which people will be communicating with one another.”
The technology, he proclaimed, “will enrich the daily lives of everybody” and “may in fact help solve many social problems.” By reducing the need for doing business in person, said Mr. Molnar, the Picturephone would alleviate pollution and urban overcrowding.
AT&T’s 1970 annual report said the company would expand Picturephone service to more than two dozen cities by 1975 and have 50,000 units in service.
“They thought they could determine the future and the rate they could make it happen,” says Jon Gertner, author of “The Idea Factory,” a history of AT&T’s Bell Labs, where the Picturephone was developed. “They were right about the future, but they were wrong about how fast they could make it happen.”
In 1964, AT&T installed Picturephone booths in Chicago, New York and Washington. Calls cost $16 to $27 per minute. In the first six months, 71 people tried it. In 1969, only three people paid to use it; the next year, none did.
Nevertheless, AT&T piloted the Picturephone for homes and businesses in Pittsburgh and Chicago in 1970. By 1972, after a year-and-a-half, only eight households in Pittsburgh remained willing to pay $160 a month. In Chicago, at $75 a month, only 46 homes kept one.
Video took up such bandwidth that long-distance calls were impossible. And so few people had a Picturephone there was almost nobody nearby they could use it with.
Furthermore, while people liked seeing the person at the other end, they didn’t much like being seen. As long ago as Plato’s “Republic,” thinkers have argued that being visible to others imposes a constraint on our behavior.
Getting accustomed not only to watching video but to being watched on video has taken the better part of a century.
A videophone played a crucial role in the 1925 silent movie ‘Up the Ladder.’ Photo: Everett Collection
The silent movie “ Up the Ladder,” from 1925, tells the story of the inventor of a fictitious videophone, who is cheating on his wife with her best friend. His wife calls her friend on the “Tele-Visionphone.” Scurrying out of the visual frame, the husband then sits where his reflection shows in a mirror, exposing the affair.
Such dreaded blunders still echo today, when children, pets and sexual indiscretion can disrupt videocalls and sometimes even derail a career.
Even so, companies kept pushing the technology, largely because they thought demand had to materialize sooner or later. It didn’t.
No one had cracked the chicken-and-egg problem: The more users a network has, the more valuable it becomes.
Even in 1990, after decades of development, only big organizations could afford what was then known as videoconferencing. Like AT&T’s customers in Pittsburgh more than 20 years earlier, they couldn’t use it successfully unless the people at the other end of the call happened to have a system from the same vendor.
Business executives hold a videoconference with a colleague in 1991. Photo: Richard Howard/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images
As recently as 2008, videoconferencing setups still cost thousands of dollars a month, out of reach of households and many small businesses.
In the past couple decades, applications such as CU-SeeMe, Skype and FaceTime helped bring down costs and inch growing numbers of consumers toward acceptance.
But videocalling still hadn’t universally broken through. That only happened when the pandemic hit.
Look at Zoom Video Communications Inc. Thanks to the lifeline that its platform extended, “zooming” has quickly become almost as common a verb as “googling.”
“Covid made that breakthrough in people’s minds,” says Oded Gal, chief product officer at Zoom: “that voice and chat aren’t enough, that they feel they really want a visual connection to break the isolation.”
Whether videocalling will remain as popular when the isolation ends is an open question. This week, the announcement that an effective vaccine against Covid-19 could be within reach caused Zoom stock to drop 25% in two days.
Call it the market’s reminder of the wild swings between absurd optimism and rejection that surround any would-be technological marvel.
Still, videocalling’s proponents, just as they did a century ago, forecast a bright future. Citing this year’s boom in areas such as telemedicine, Mr. Gal thinks videochats will continue to bring people together in ways that wouldn’t have happened if Covid hadn’t created that openness to be on video.
The new technologies for video communication will give businesses and researchers “an ever expanding horizon.”
But those last words aren’t Mr. Gal’s. They come from an article a business forecaster wrote in 1970. His name: Alan Greenspan, future chairman of the Federal Reserve.
Maybe I should try zooming him so we can laugh about it together.
Write to Jason Zweig at intelligentinvestor@wsj.com
Copyright © 2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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| From: Jon Koplik | 11/21/2020 11:36:52 PM | | | | | | Apparent decapitated body washed up on Florida beach actually a store mannequin ............
Nov 18, 2020
An apparent decapitated body found washed up on a Florida beach was actually just a store mannequin
By Kelly McLaughlin
The mannequin found by a volunteer with Ocean Hour. Ocean Hour
A volunteer for Ocean Hour, a Florida based nonprofit that organizes beach cleanups across the state, found what appeared to be a decapitated dead body on a beach in the Florida Panhandle. It was later revealed that the body was actually a mannequin. The group shared pictures of the mannequin on Facebook on Monday.
Ocean Hour, a Florida based nonprofit that organizes beach cleanups across the state, shared news of what happened on Facebook on Monday.
The group said a volunteer named Kathleen was working to clean up a beach on Perdido Key in the Florida Panhandle when she saw what she believed to be a decapitated body.
"Another visitor had even called 911," Ocean Hour said on Facebook. "Upon further investigating, she realized it was a mannequin!"
The mannequin was covered in barnacles, so it was difficult to tell what it was at first glance.
But a closer look shows a plastic foot and hole where the mannequin's head would be.
"How long has she been out in the water collecting barnacles and sealife? Way too long!" the organization said. "We are glad it wasn't a real body!"
Copyright © 2020 Insider Inc.
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