Month: December 2023

Enlarge / A related species of Fusarium. (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

While it may be the reason behind tires skidding, pipes bursting, and closed roads making traffic a nightmare, ice doesn’t always form as easily as it seems. It often gets an assist from proteins made by fungi. 

Never mind the common thinking that ice forms at 0° C (32° F). Though this is water’s freezing point, pure water will only freeze when temperatures plummet as low as minus 46° C (minus 50.8° F). So why does it usually freeze at zero anyway? Organisms such as bacteria, insects, and fungi produce proteins known as ice nucleators (non-protein nucleators can also be of abiotic origin). These proteins can kick-start the formation, or nucleation, of ice at higher temperatures than pure water would freeze at.

While the exact reason fungi make these proteins remains unknown, researchers Valeria Molinero of the University of Utah and Konrad Meister of Boise State University led a study that has revealed more about how fungal ice nucleators can both promote and hold back ice formation more efficiently than those of many other life-forms.

Enlarge (credit: Google Drive)

Google is dealing with its second "lost data" fiasco in the past few months. This time, it's Google Drive, which has been mysteriously losing files for some people. Google acknowledged the issue on November 27, and a week later, it posted what it called a fix.

It doesn't feel like Google is describing this issue correctly; the company still calls it a "syncing issue" with the Drive desktop app versions 84.0.0.0 through 84.0.4.0. Syncing problems would only mean files don't make it to or from the cloud, and that doesn't explain why people are completely losing files. In the most popular issue thread on the Google Drive Community forums, several users describe spreadsheets and documents going missing, which all would have been created and saved in the web interface, not the desktop app, and it's hard to see how the desktop app could affect that. Many users peg "May 2023" as the time documents stopped saving. Some say they've never used the desktop app.

Drive has multiple ways of syncing files, which complicates any explanation or diagnosis of what's going on. The most suspect mode in the whole fiasco is the default "file streaming," mode which is actually cloud-first. Files get removed from your computer and stored in the cloud, saving space and leaving only a web link in their place. Perhaps a "syncing" issue could remove files from your computer before uploading (that still doesn't explain the claims of missing web documents, though).