Month: November 2018

Enlarge / A vendor delivers coal briquettes which are mostly used to fuel small coal burners for heating and cooking for low-income homes and restaurants, in an old hutong neighborhood in Beijing, 26 December 2007. (credit: Teh Eng Koon/AFP/Getty Images)

In China, coal and biomass like wood chips and sawdust are burned for cooking and heating. The resulting household pollution has contributed significantly to China's poor air quality. But between 2005 and 2015, China's population moved to urban centers and grew wealthier. More and more people were able to switch their cooking and heating to natural gas- and electricity-powered appliances. Now, researchers from Tsinghua University in Beijing and the University of California Berkeley say that the shift likely saves about 400,000 lives annually.

Research published this week showed that population-weighted exposure to fine-particle pollution in Chinese households decreased by nearly half between 2005 and 2015. Ninety percent of that decrease came from changes in cookstove and heating technology. These changes avoided 400,000 premature deaths from particulate exposure annually, because fine-particle pollution is strongly linked to premature death in people with lung or heart disease, and it causes a host of other lung and heart problems.

Invisible hand of health

What's interesting is that these positive changes happened without any government intervention; they were unintended consequences of a booming economy. That means there's a lot of room left for further improvements. As of 2015, household fuels still accounted for 43 percent of the fine-particulate-related mortality in China, as solid fuels like coal and biomass haven't been completely eliminated. They're especially prevalent in low-income households and in rural areas where natural gas and electricity service is nonexistent.

Enlarge / Elizabeth Banks as Lucy (aka Wyldstyle) and Chris Pratt as Emmett are back to take on LEGO DUPLO invaders from outer space in The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part. (credit: Warner Bros. Picture)

It has been five years in the making, but the defenders of the LEGO universe are back to fend off alien invaders in The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part. If you liked the smartly zany goofiness of the original, there's much to recommend in the sequel, judging by this latest trailer.

(Spoilers for first The LEGO Movie below.)

In the first LEGO movie, we met Emmet Brickowski (voiced by Chris Pratt), a lowly worker in the town of Bricksburg who cheerfully fulfills his role as a cog in Lord Business' (Will Ferrell) corporate machine. That includes merrily singing the corporate theme song, "Everything is Awesome." (It's a bona fide ear worm. Just try to get that tune out of your head.) Lord Business has discovered a super-weapon, the "Kragle"—basically a giant tube of Krazy Glue—that will freeze the LEGO world permanently in its present form.

Enlarge / For millions of sleep apnea sufferers, CPAP machines are the only way to get a good night's sleep. (credit: Somsak Bumroongwong / EyeEm)

Last March, Tony Schmidt discovered something unsettling about the machine that helps him breathe at night. Without his knowledge, it was spying on him.

From his bedside, the device was tracking when he was using it and sending the information not just to his doctor, but to the maker of the machine, to the medical supply company that provided it, and to his health insurer.

Schmidt, an information technology specialist from Carrollton, Texas, was shocked. “I had no idea they were sending my information across the wire.”

Enlarge (credit: Diego Torres Silvestre / Flickr)

Nearly a month ago, Canadian authorities arrested a man they believe to be "redandwhite," a hitman allegedly hired by Ross Ulbricht. Also known as Dread Pirate Roberts (DPR), Ulbricht created the infamous and now-defunct underground drug website, Silk Road.

Ulbricht is now serving a double life sentence. Earlier this year, after a federal judge ended Ulbricht's chances for a new trial, the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal in his case.

The new suspect, James Ellingson, age 42, was released on bail earlier this month by a judge in British Columbia despite American efforts to keep him detained. Separately, Ellingson allegedly made $2 million in profits from selling drugs directly on Silk Road.

Enlarge / Remember this guy? (credit: Pardon Snowden)

Digital privacy has come a long way since June 2013. In the five years since documents provided by Edward Snowden became the basis for a series of revelations that tore away a veil of secrecy around broad surveillance programs run by the National Security Agency, there have been shifts in both technology and policy that have changed the center of gravity for personal electronic privacy in the United States and around the world. Sadly, not all of the changes have been positive. And Snowden's true legacy is a lot more complicated than his admirers (or his critics) will admit.

Starting with that first article published by the Guardian that revealed a National Security Agency program gathering millions of phone records from Verizon—which gave the agency access to metadata about phone calls placed by or received by everyone in America—the Snowden leaks exposed the inner workings of the NSA's biggest signals intelligence programs. Coming to light next was the PRISM program, which allowed the NSA, via the FBI, to gain access directly to customer data from nine Internet companies without notifying the customers. And then came Boundless Informant, a tool for visualizing the amount of signals intelligence being collected from each country in the world. By the time the Snowden cache had been largely mined out, hundreds of files—ranging from PowerPoint presentations to dumps of Internal Wikis and Web discussion boards—had been reviewed and revealed by journalists.

"Thanks to Snowden's disclosures, people worldwide were able to engage in an extraordinary and unprecedented debate about government surveillance," the American Civil Liberties Union declared on the fifth anniversary of the Guardian article.