Month: August 2020

Enlarge / Podcasts with your interests—and attention span—in mind. (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

The beauty of the podcast format is also sometimes its curse: arbitrary episode lengths. Finding a new podcast to love can be daunting when episodes regularly exceed the hour-long mark. If you’re struggling to commit to podcasts on topics like history and science, don’t fret: We have recommendations for great series that typically serve complete episodes well under half an hour.

Science Diction

Sometimes the best way to recover from stress is to focus on learning something new. Science Diction helps with this by presenting the etymologies of familiar scientific technical terms alongside bite-sized usage histories of how people engage with science. The episode on "Meme," for example, tells the story of the word's coinage as a parallel to "gene" to show how ideas spread through a culture. Science Diction talks about the spread of "meme" itself, sometimes as a meme, until it became the one of the most common ways to refer to images and jokes passed around on the Internet. An episode titled "Vaccine," meanwhile, teaches us what happens when the public is scared of new science, describing antivax propaganda nearly as old as the first vaccines themselves.

Science Diction releases episodes monthly, and it only started this year, so many of its episodes are about concepts related to COVID-19. Even if you’re fatigued by that topic, I still recommend this podcast as a refreshing, historical overview of similar stories, told in a laid-back way.

Enlarge / India saw a notable decline in aerosol pollution in April. (credit: NASA EO)

Given the radical changes people have undertaken to limit the spread of COVID-19 (hello month six of quarantine-except-for-groceries), many have naturally wondered what impact this has had on pollution, including greenhouse gases and climate change. Some short-lived pollutants dropped noticeably during the strong lockdowns of April, as businesses shuttered and travel was reduced. But CO₂ levels don't fluctuate based on short-term events like that, so the long-term effect on climate change was expected to be trivially small—assuming economies rebounded fairly quickly.

A new study led by the University of Leeds’ Piers Forster (and his daughter Harriet) takes advantage of phone location data to re-examine the first six months of the year, tracking more than just CO₂. While they ultimately find that the impact has been small, their results also highlight that the way economies choose to rebound could have a much bigger effect over the long term.

The work relies on mobility data made public by Google and Apple, covering 114 countries. Using that along with energy and emissions datasets, the researchers converted behavior changes into pollution changes. The phone data record changes in transportation use quite well, although purported changes in activity between residential, commercial, and industrial settings are harder to relate to energy. The researchers compared the changes they saw in their phone data to a May study that estimated April emissions using things like utility data. They found their phone-based estimate of home energy use probably overestimates the real change.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

In October, Michael Stay got a weird message on LinkedIn. A total stranger had lost access to his bitcoin private keys—and wanted Stay's help getting his $300,000 back.

It wasn't a total surprise that The Guy, as Stay calls him, had found the former Google security engineer. Nineteen years ago, Stay published a paper detailing a technique for breaking into encrypted zip files. The Guy had bought around $10,000 worth of bitcoin in January 2016, well before the boom. He had encrypted the private keys in a zip file and had forgotten the password. He was hoping Stay could help him break in.

In a talk at the Defcon security conference this week, Stay details the epic attempt that ensued.

Enlarge / Despite trillions of dollars of economic damage, Bill Gates is optimistic that a strong pipeline of therapies and vaccines will carry the US through the pandemic. (credit: Jeff Pachoud | Getty Images)

For 20 years Bill Gates has been easing out of the roles that made him rich and famous—CEO, chief software architect, and chair of Microsoft—and devoting his brain power and passion to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, abandoning earnings calls and antitrust hearings for the metrics of disease eradication and carbon reduction. This year, after he left the Microsoft board, one would have thought he would have relished shedding the spotlight directed at the four CEOs of big tech companies called before Congress.

But as with many of us, 2020 had different plans for Gates. An early Cassandra who warnedof our lack of preparedness for a global pandemic, he became one of the most credible figures as his foundation made huge investments in vaccines, treatments, and testing. He also became a target of the plague of misinformation afoot in the land, as logorrheic critics accused him of planning to inject microchips in vaccine recipients. (Fact check: false. In case you were wondering.)

My first interview with Gates was in 1983, and I’ve long lost count of how many times I’ve spoken to him since. He’s yelled at me (more in the earlier years) and made me laugh (more in the latter years). But I’ve never looked forward to speaking to him more than in our year of Covid. We connected on Wednesday, remotely of course. In discussing our country’s failed responses, his issues with his friend Mark Zuckerberg’s social networks, and the innovations that might help us out of this mess, Gates did not disappoint. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.